Edward Young (poet)

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Edward Young

Edward Young (born July 3, 1683 in Upham in Hampshire , † April 5, 1765 in Welwyn in Hertfordshire ) was an English poet.

life and work

Born the son of a clergyman, Young devoted himself to the study of law at Oxford , which he graduated with a doctorate in 1719 after obtaining a bachelor's degree in Civil Law in 1714 . He then worked as a tutor in various noble houses.

His first poems The last day (1713) and The force of religion (1714) had no effect. Young's renowned and enduring admirers included the controversial Philip, 1st Duke of Wharton . Young dedicated his tragedy Revenge to him in 1723 . Between 1725 and 1728 Young wrote his seven satires The Universal Passion as individual works on the background of his experiences with aristocratic society , which were published collectively in 1728.

In 1719 he went to London , where he entered the clergy at the age of almost fifty and obtained a position as court chaplain in 1728 through a poem in praise of King George II . Two years later, however, he resigned and became pastor at Wetwyn, Hertfordshire . This benefice, donated by his college, served to secure his income in old age; however, he probably only took up the position temporarily.

The money that had brought him his first satires, published in 1728, was lost to Young in the so-called South Sea fraud . Young's marriage to the Earl of Lichtfeld's widowed daughter was apparently very happy, but only lasted ten years. The death of his beloved stepdaughter, his son-in-law and finally his wife prompted him to write his most famous poetry, The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality 1742-1745 (German laments or night thoughts ). The poem Night Thoughts, comprising around 10,000 blank verses, with its painfully gloomy and melancholy reflections on death and transience as well as immortality, which also served as the model for Novalis ' Hymns to the Night , soon made the font the favorite book of educated Europe. Following his example, John Milton , Young intended a great cosmology that would include the entire chain of being with God, human beings, society, and morality and virtue as a whole. Diction, verse and rhetoric are mostly based on the classical form; Similarly, much of the intellectual world of Young's poetry is still in the Enlightenment-classicist tradition. In addition to the melancholy mood, Young's images of night, grave and death as well as his powerful psalms and hymns style, as well as the authentic expression of deeper feelings against the background of his own painful losses, are seen as new or even revolutionary elements.

Young's Night Thoughts achieved their extraordinary popularity all over Europe at the time , primarily as an expression of the contemporary lifestyle of sensitivity . The poem was translated into almost all European languages ​​and found admirers as far as Russia. In Germany, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was one of Young's followers ; the German translation of Young's poems was done by Johann Arnold Ebert .

Although Young was still deeply rooted in neoclassicism, there were already clearly pronounced pre-romantic moments in the religious sensitivity and in the individual consciousness of the Night Thoughts , which Young reinforced in his subsequent literary theoretical writings.

An equally enthusiastic response, especially in Germany, was his poetry-theoretical work Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), which was dedicated to Samuel Richardson . In the same way that his Night Thoughts were celebrated throughout Europe as the dawn of a new age of poetry, the Conjectures on Original Composition were considered a manifesto of early Romanticism .

Young never got over the death of his beloved wife. After falling out with his son, he refused to see him again before he died, but bequeathed all of his fortune to him.

Today's literary research interest in Young's work has almost completely come to a standstill; However, due to the popularity of his melancholy-meditative night thoughts, he is still given a place in the canon of English literary history, even though this work is seldom read nowadays.

Honors

After him and Thomas Young , the plant genus is Youngia Cass. named from the sunflower family (Asteraceae).

plant

First edition of the "Night-Thoughts" from 1743

Young mostly criticized people's vices such as lust for glory, lust or unbelief in his works, which were shaped by Christian moral ideas.

  • The Revenge , 1721 (German Die Rache , 1756, prose translation)
  • The Universial Passion , 1726
  • The Instalment , 1726
  • Cynthio , 1727
  • A Vindication of Providence , 1728
  • Imperium Pelagi, a Naval Lyrick , 1730
  • A Sea-Piece ... , 1733
  • The Foreign Address, or The Best Argument for Peace , 1734
  • The Complaint or Night-Thoughts , 1742-1745
  • The Centaur not Fabulous; in Five Letters to a Friend , 1755
  • Resignation , 1762

literature

Web links

Commons : Edward Young  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
Wikiquote: Edward Young  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Heide N. Rohloff: Young, Edward. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 p. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 646.
  2. ↑ See Heide N. Rohloff: Young, Edward. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 p. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 646.
  3. ↑ See Heide N. Rohloff: Young, Edward. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 p. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 646.
  4. ↑ See Heide N. Rohloff: Young, Edward. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 p. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 646.
  5. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. DTV, 3rd edition Munich 1997, p. 452 f.
  6. ↑ See Heide N. Rohloff: Young, Edward. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 p. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 646.
  7. ↑ See Heide N. Rohloff: Young, Edward. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 p. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 646.
  8. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 , doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Young, Edward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1683
PLACE OF BIRTH Upham , Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 1765
Place of death Welwyn , Hertfordshire