Heinrich Heine

Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg , an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism. Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg was born in 1772 at Oberwiederstedt manor , in the Harz mountains. The family seat was a manorial estate, not simply a... stately home. Novalis descended from ancient, Low German nobility. Different lines of the family include such important, influential magistrates and ministry officials as the Prussian chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg . An oil painting and a christening cap commonly assigned to Novalis are his only possessions now extant. In the church in Wiederstedt, he was christened Georg Philipp Friedrich. He spent his childhood on the family estate and used it as the starting point for his travels into the Harz mountains. Novalis’s father, the estate owner and salt-mine manager Heinrich Ulrich Erasmus Freiherr von Hardenberg , was a strictly pietistic man who had become a member of the Moravian Church.
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Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his 40 plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they... are in fact used to define the genre. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander contributing to the trial and execution of Socrates although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. His second play, The Babylonians , was denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis.
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Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German poet, critic and scholar. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was a critical leader of German Romanticism. Schlegel was born at Hanover. He studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, but ultimately devoted himself entirely to literary... studies. He published in 1797 Die Griechen und Römer , which was followed by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer . At Jena, where he lectured as a Privatdozent at the university, he co-founded the Athenaeum, contributing to that journal the aphorisms and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. Here also he wrote Lucinde , an unfinished romance, which is interesting as an attempt to transfer to practical ethics the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom, and Alarcos, a tragedy in which, without much success, he combined romantic and classical elements.
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George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go... no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. He travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died at 36 years old from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece. Byron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. It has been speculated that he suffered from bipolar I disorder, or manic depression. Byron's names were changed throughout his life.
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