Carl Spitteler

Carl Spitteler (born April 24, 1845, Liestal, Switz.—died Dec. 29, 1924, Lucerne) was a Swiss poet of visionary imagination and author of pessimistic yet heroic verse. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919.

Spitteler was a private tutor for eight years in Russia and Finland. After he returned to Switzerland in 1879, he made his living as a teacher and journalist. He contributed articles to Der Kunstwart and was an editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 1892 a legacy enabled him to settle in Lucerne and devote himself to creative work.

Spitteler’s first great poetic work was the mythical epic Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881). His second great work (which won him the Nobel Prize) was the poetic epic Der olympische Frühling (1900–05; revised 1910; “The Olympic Spring”), in which he found full scope for bold invention and vividly expressive power. The last years of his life were given up to rewriting his first work. Tighter in composition than the early version and, like Der olympische Frühling, in rhyming couplets, it appeared in 1924 under the title Prometheus der Dulder (“Prometheus the Long-Suffering”).

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Poetry: First Lines

The widely varied peripheral works belong to Spitteler’s middle period. He produced, in verse, Extramundana (1883), seven cosmic myths of his own invention; Balladen (1896); Literarische Gleichnisse (1892; “Literary Parables”); and two cycles of lyrics, Schmetterlinge (1889; “Butterflies”) and Gras- und Glockenlieder (1906; “Grass and Bell Songs”). He also wrote two masterly stories—Die Mädchenfeinde (1907; Two Little Misogynists, 1922), a childhood idyll derived from his own experience; and Conrad der Leutnant (1898), a dramatically finished Novelle in which he approached the Naturalism he otherwise hated. His novel Imago (1906) so sharply reflected his inner conflict between a visionary creative gift and middle-class values that it influenced the development of psychoanalysis. He published a volume of stimulating essays, Lachende Wahrheiten (1898; Laughing Truths), and biographical works of charm, including Meine frühesten Erlebnisse (1914; “My Earliest Experiences”). In 1914 he published a politically influential tract, “Unser Schweizer Standpunkt,” directed against a one-sided pro-German view of World War I. An English translation of his Selected Poems appeared in 1928.