Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/August Ludwig Follen

FOLLEN, August (or, as he afterwards called himself, Adolf) Ludwig (1794–1855), a German poet, was born at Giessen in Hesse-Cassel, January 21, 1794. He studied theology at Giessen and law at Heidelberg, and after leaving college edited the Elberfeld Allgemeine Zeitung. For connexion, real or supposed, with some radical plots, he was imprisoned for two years at Berlin. When released in 1821 he went to Switzerland, where he taught in the canton school at Aarau, farmed from 1847 to 1854 the estate of Liebenfels in Thurgau, and then retired to Bern, where he lived till his death (26th December 1855). Besides a number of minor poems he wrote Harfengrüsse aus Deutschland und der Schweiz (1823), and Malegys und Vivian (1829), a knightly romance after the fashion of the romantic school, edited parts of Tristan und Isolde and the Niebelungenlied, translated the Homeric Hymns in company with R. Schwenck (Giessen, 1814), Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1818), and a collection of Latin hymns and sacred poetry (Elberfeld, 1819). In 1846 he published a brief collection of sonnets entitled An die Gottlosen Nichts-Wütheriche. This was aimed at Ruge, and was the occasion of a literary duel between the two authors. Follen's posthumous poem Tristan's Aeltern (Giessen, 1857) may also be mentioned, but his best-known work is a well-executed collection of German poetry entitled Bildersaal Deutscher Dichtung (2 vols., 1827).