Friedrich von Hardenberg, who later grew to become referred to as the poet Novalis, stored a magazine among April and July 1797 that captured his moods, recommendations, and observations following the loss of life of his fifteen-year-old fiancée Sophie von Kühn and his dearly enjoyed more youthful brother Erasmus. The journal’s brief, day by day entries permit a frank and candid glimpse into the interior lifetime of the maturing poet, and are complemented by way of choices from Hardenberg’s letters. Taken jointly, and browse along side the fragments written ahead of, in the course of, and soon after this time period, the magazine and letters make clear a strategy of self-discovery in which Hardenberg turned confident of his poetic vocation and said this conviction in an act of self-christening, because the poet Novalis.

“The start of Novalis … the name of which recollects the outworn picture, really dismantles the Novalis legend. This useful biographical assortment concentrates at the engagement to Sophie von Kühn, from the poet’s assembly with the twelve-year-old to her excruciating dying at simply fifteen. … The diaries are choked with references to social occasions, to conversations, food, walks, etc. There also are a few particularly frank notes on his sexual intercourse, what Novalis calls ‘the pride of my fantastical desires.’” — The occasions Literary Supplement

“This publication deals, for the first actual time, a competent and lucid translation into English of an important fundamental resources touching on the biography of the German Romantic poet-philosopher Novalis. the following we glimpse the interior workings of a now mythical occasion: the transformation of the mining scholar Friedrich von Hardenberg into the romantic poet Novalis. the assumption to assemble letters and assisting biographical fabric from accurately this era and unite them right into a unmarried quantity is either a masterly and welcome company. It ultimately permits an English-speaking viewers direct entry to 1 of the main attention-grabbing and enduring love relationships in literary history—that of Sophie von Kühn and Friedrich von Hardenberg. Donehower’s insightful creation and punctiliously readable remark interspersed among the letters does greatly to split the very fact from the fiction and fable in Hardenberg’s biography.” — David W. wooden, college of Paris IV, Sorbonne

“Making this fabric on hand in English is a smart carrier and lengthy late. It bargains the fabrics to contextualize Novalis’ different writings, displaying how his paintings responds to his specific biographical context (unavoidable, given the powerful mythmaking surrounding Novalis’ own losses and their fictionalizations).” — Katherine Arens, writer of Empire in Decline: Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Wilhelminian Germany

Bruce Donehower is Lecturer within the collage Writing application on the collage of California at Davis. he's the writer of Miko, Little Hunter of the North.