Letter poem

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Letter poem is a collective term for all types of real or fake letters written in poetry .

Examples of letter poems go back to antiquity, the best known are Ovid's Heroides , fake letters written in elegiac distichs by mythological women to their male partners complaining about neglect and / or bad treatment, as well as the Epistulae of Horace written in hexameters . From the Middle Ages there are special forms of the Minnebrief , a love greeting written in pairs of rhymes to the beloved, and in France the trobadore the Salut d'amour . In the Baroque period, Hofmannswaldau took up Ovid's form again ( Helden-Briefe 1664); further examples can be found in French Rococo and German anacreontics in Goeckingk , Gleim , Rabener and Wieland .

In the Weimar Classics , Goethe's letter poems to Frau von Stein , Augusta zu Stolberg , Marianne von Willemer and Bettina Brentano are the most important examples of the genre in German literature and at the same time models of casual poetry on a high level. As an example, Goethe's poem to Charlotte von Stein:

Certainly, I would have gone so far, far away,
as far as the world is only open,
not overpowering stars conquer me , Which
attached my fate to yours,
That in you I only get to know myself.
My poetry, aspirations, hope and longing,
pushing for you and your being alone,
my life only depends on your life.

After the Classical period, there are occasional poems by Heinrich Heine , Clemens Brentano , Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué , Annette von Droste-Hülshoff , Theodor Fontane , Detlev von Liliencron , Rainer Maria Rilke (correspondence with Erika Mitterer ) and Joachim Ringelnatz .

In French literature you can find letter poems by Clément Marot and in English by John Donne , John Dryden , Alexander Pope and John Keats, among others .

literature