Johann Heinrich Voss

After attending the Gymnasium at Neubrandenburg from 1766 to 1769, he was obliged to accept a private tutorship in order to earn money to enable him to study at a university.

[1] At the invitation of Heinrich Christian Boie, whose attention he had attracted by poems contributed to the Göttinger Musenalmanach, he went to the University of Göttingen in 1772.

In 1805, although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used his utmost endeavours to persuade him to stay, Voss accepted a call to a professorship of classical literature at the University of Heidelberg.

Here, in the enjoyment of a considerable salary, he devoted himself entirely to his literary labours, translations and antiquarian research until his death.

In this work, he sought to apply the style and methods of classical poetry to the expression of modern German thought and sentiment.

The later works Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier (1819) and Antisymbolik (2 volumes, 1824–1826), the latter written in opposition to Georg Friedrich Creuzer, have been characterized as painstaking and dignified, but dreary.

He was also prominent as an advocate of the right of free judgment in religion, and at the time when some members of the Romantic school were being converted to the Roman Catholic Church, he produced a strong impression by a powerful article, in Heinrich Paulus's journal Sophronizon, on his friend Friedrich von Stolberg's repudiation of Protestantism (1819).

Festschrift zum hundertjährigen Gedenktage seiner Ankunft daselbst (1882); and another life by Paulus[clarification needed] (Heidelberg, 1826); also Robert Prutz, Der Göttinger Dichterbund (Leipzig, 1841).

According to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Voss is the most likely source for the phrase Wein, Weib und Gesang, or, in English, "wine, women and song".

Voss's full phrase is Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang / Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebelang ("He who loves not wine, woman and song / Remains a fool his whole life long").