Novalis enrolled at the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology in 1797, where he studied a wide number of disciplines including electricity, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, mineralogy and natural philosophy.

He conversed with many of the formative figures of the Early Germanic Romantic period, including Goethe, Friedrich Schelling, Jean Paul and August Schlegel.

Novalis's early reputation as a romantic poet was primarily based on his literary works, which were published by his friends Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck shortly after his death, in 1802.

The depth of Novalis's knowledge in fields like philosophy and natural science came to be more broadly appreciated with the more extensive publication of his notebooks in the twentieth century.

The fragment allowed him to synthesize poetry, philosophy, and science into a single art form that could be used to address a wide variety of topics.

Novalis, baptized Georg Philipp Friedrich, was the Freiherr (Baron) von Hardenberg, born in 1772 at his family estate in the Electorate of Saxony, the Schloss Oberwiederstedt, in the village of Wiederstedt,[2]: 24  which is now located in the present-day town of Arnstein.

[3]: 6–7 When he was twelve, Novalis was put under the charge of his uncle Gottlob Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Hardenberg (1728-1800), Land commander of the Teutonic Order, who lived at his rural estate in Lucklum.

[17] In the final months of 1795, Sophie began to suffer declining health due to a liver tumor[20] that was thought to be caused by tuberculosis.

[2]: 49  While at the academy, Novalis immersed himself in a wide range of studies, including electricity, galvanism, alchemy, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and natural philosophy.

[25] In this collection, Das allgemeine Brouillon (Notes for a General Encyclopedia), Novalis began integrating his knowledge of natural science into his literary work.

[11]: 7  This metaphoric sense of his pen name can be seen in the epigraph of Pollen, the first work he published as Novalis: "Friends, the soil is poor, we must scatter seed abundantly for even a moderate harvest".

[3]: 29–30  By December, he became an assessor of the salt mines and a director, and at the end of 1800, the 28-year-old Novalis was appointed an Amtmann for the district of Thuringia,[2]: 42  a position comparable to a contemporary magistrate.

While on a trip to Jena in the summer of 1799, Novalis met Ludwig Tieck, who became one of his closest friends and greatest intellectual influences in the last two years of his life.

However, recent research suggests that he may have suffered from cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that may have been responsible for the early death of many of his siblings, including his brother Erasmus.

[39] His unfinished novels Heinrich von Ofterdingen and The Novices at Sais and numerous other poems and fragments were published posthumously by Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel.

[40] He was known as the poet of the blue flower, a symbol of romantic yearning from Novalis's unfinished Novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen that became an key emblem for German Romanticism.

[41] Because Sophie von Kühn was also thought to have died from tuberculosis, Novalis became the poet of the blue flower who was reunited with his beloved through the death of the white plague.

These words are meant to startle readers into attentiveness, making them aware of his use of the arts, particularly poetry with its metaphor and symbolism, to explore and unify various understandings of nature in his all-embracing investigations.

[53] Novalis derived his theory of health from the Scottish physician John Brown's system of medicine, which sees illness as a mismatch between sensory stimulation and internal state.

[3]: 78  One of his final works, which was posthumously named Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe) when it was first published in full in 1826, has generated a great deal of controversy regarding Novalis's religious views.

[3] After Novalis died, the Jena Romantics wrote of him as a seer who would bring forth a new gospel:[42] one who lived his life as one aiming toward the spiritual while looking at death as a means of overcoming human limitation[62] in a revolutionary movement toward God.

[67] In this view, Novalis's religious thought was based on his attempts to reconcile Fichte's idealism, in which the sense of self arises in the distinction of subject and object, with Baruch Spinoza's naturalistic philosophy, in which all being is one substance.

Rather, it is an argument in poetic language, phrased in the mode of a myth,[60] for a cosmopolitan vision of a unity[37] that brings together past and future, ideal and real, to engage the listener in an unfinished historical process.

Heinrich von Ofterdingen was conceived as a response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a work that Novalis had read with enthusiasm but judged as being highly unpoetical.

In addition to their political focus, both works share a common theme of poetically arguing for the importance of "faith and love" to achieve human and communal unification.

[35] In this work, Novalis addresses the king and queen, emphasizing their importance as role models for creating an enduring state of interconnectedness both on the individual and collective level.

[81] Though a substantial portion of the essay was published, Frederick Wilhelm III censored the publication of additional installments as he felt it held the monarchy to impossibly high standards.

[88] The literary critic Walter Pater includes Novalis's quote, "Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren" ("to philosophize is to throw off apathy, to become revived")[18] in his conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

The 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger uses a Novalis fragment, "Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere" in the opening pages of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

Novalis has also influenced film theory by way of Jacques Rancière, who employs various elements of German Idealism and Romanticism in his philosophical work on critical philosophy and the regimes of art.