Miegel attended the Girls' High School in Königsberg and then lived between 1894 and 1896 in a guest house in Weimar, where she wrote her first poems.

She signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the 1933 declaration in which 88 German authors vowed faithful allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

Agnes Miegel now mainly wrote poems and short stories about East Prussia, the land of her youth.

Miegel received the honorary title Mutter Ostpreußen ("Mother East Prussia") from her admirers.

[6] During the Third Reich National Socialist themes appear in her work: complaints about the "heavy yoke" borne by cities like Memel and Danzig, which had been separated from Germany after the First World War;[7] glorification of the war;[8] glorification of the mothers who bear German children.

[9] But as early as her 1920 poem "Über der Weichsel drüben" ("On the other side of the Vistula") (republished in Ostland)[10] she propagated fear of the Poles, who, she suggested, wanted to overrun East Prussia.

The first of these, Dem Führer, was published in 1936 and cited in Werden und Werk (1938), a study of Miegel's life and works.

[12] The second poem, An den Führer, is, in Tauber's words, an "hysterical adulation" of Hitler,[13] published as a kind of preface in Ostland.

In the Soviet occupation zone in Germany after the Second World War both Werden und Werk and Ostland were forbidden books.

The title of her first bundle of poems after the war is characteristic: Du aber bleibst in mir ("You however stay within me").

Blackbourn shows that this was "exactly the idealized image that the expellee organisations cultivated – as if all had been pastoral harmony until the Red Army marched west, as if the mass flight of Germans had fallen out of a clear blue sky.

In 1933 she joined the writers' section of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, together with prominent Nazis such as Hanns Johst.

They filled the vacancies that had arisen because some members, amongst them Alfred Döblin and Thomas Mann, had to give up their seats for not being loyal to the Nazi regime.

In 1935 she received the "honorary ring" of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein and in 1936 the Johann-Gottfried-von-Herder-Preis (the predecessor of the Herder Prize).

In 1939 she was made an honorary citizen of Königsberg; in the same year she received the Golden Decoration of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth).

Agnes Miegel was (with Gerhart Hauptmann and Hanns Johst, among others) ranked as one of the six greatest German writers.

On 26 October 1992 a plaque was put on her former dwelling house in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, with texts in German and Russian.