Nikolaus Lenau

He was born at Csatád (Schadat), Kingdom of Hungary, now Lenauheim, Banat, then part of the Habsburg monarchy, now in Romania.

His father, a Habsburg government official, died in 1807 in Budapest, leaving his children in the care of their mother, who remarried in 1811.

In 1819 Nikolaus went to the University of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pozsony (Bratislava) and then spent the next four years qualifying himself in medicine.

In 1836 his Faust appeared, in which he laid bare his own soul to the world;[2][1] in 1837, Savonarola, an epic in which freedom from political and intellectual tyranny as an essential component of Christianity was stated.

His political poems, such as "By the Grave of a Minister," reveal Lenau's liberal sympathies with their attacks on the despotism of Metternich's reactionary system and the alleged corruption of the Catholic Church.

His excellent poem, "Herbst", expresses the sadness and melancholy he felt after his sojourn in the United States and his strenuous travels across the Atlantic to return to Europe.

He is the greatest modern lyric poet of Austria, and the typical representative in German literature of that pessimistic Weltschmerz which, beginning with Lord Byron, reached its culmination in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi.

by Anastasius Grün in 1855, but there are several more modern editions, as those by Max Koch in Joseph Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur of 1888 (vols.