Background
Eduard Friedrich Mörike was born on September 8, 1804, at Ludwigsburg, Germany. His father was Karl Friedrich Mörike (died 1817), a district medical councilor; his mother was Charlotte Bayer.
Eduard Friedrich Mörike was born on September 8, 1804, at Ludwigsburg, Germany. His father was Karl Friedrich Mörike (died 1817), a district medical councilor; his mother was Charlotte Bayer.
Mörike studied theology at Tübingen (1822 - 1826).
After eight migratory years as curate after studies, Mörike settled down as pastor in the little village of Cleversulzbach to an idyllic and quiet life. Ill health, however, forced him to retire from the pastorate in 1843. To earn enough to marry, he accepted in 1851 a professorship of German literature in a girls' seminary in Stuttgart.
The poet's whole life was spent in his native Swabia, and its idyllic landscape entered the very essence of his poetry. Although he wrote a two-volume novel Maler Nolten (1832) ("Painter Nolten"), and a number of shorter narrative pieces, including Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (1855) ("Mozart on His Journey to Prague"), his prose masterpiece, Mörike is first and foremost a lyric poet of rare charm and originality.
In scope and variety of content and form he is reminiscent of Goethe, of whom he seems not so much a disciple as a spiritual descendant. While Mörike like Goethe held aloof from the more complicated Greek lyric stanzas, his poems show him as one of the great masters of the classic hexameter, the elegiac couplet, and especially the Greek trimeter.
Of the favorite Romantic verse forms he excels in the sonnet, the ottava rima, and the Spanish trochaic measures. To these must be added the native Knittelvers, free rhythms, the common measures of the folksong, and a number of structures, some brilliantly inventive, of his own creation. Even though fellow poets and the critic Friedrich Vischer acclaimed Mörike's lyric genius, his art gained recognition very slowly.
Fame did not overtake him until years after his death, when the composer Hugo Wolf became his interpreter. The idyllic realism of Der alte Turmhahn ("The Old Weathervane") and Storchenbotschaft ("The Stork's Message") is only one aspect of his lyric poetry. There is also the myth-creating fancy of Um Mitternacht ("Around Midnight") and Der Feuerreiter ("The Fire Rider"), as well as a grotesque Aristophanic sense of humor, as seen in Das Märchen vom sicheren Mann ("The Story of a Safe Man"). Delicate fancy, earthbound realism, the airy grace of the Rococo, and the harmony of classic Greek poetry are the components of Mörike'sMorike's art.
( The legend of Sylvester and his annual journey to Earth...)
Quotes from others about the person
His work was greatly praised by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who recommended him to Bertrand Russell as
really a great poet and his poems are among the best things we have. .. the beauty of Mörike's work is very closely related to Goethe's.
