Stefan George

Stefan George was a German poet of the Symbolist school, born in 1868 in Büdesheim near Bingen on the Rhine and active until his death in 1933. After a humanist schooling in Darmstadt he travelled to London and Paris, where he met Paul Verlaine and was received into the Tuesday gatherings of Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he took as a lifelong model for his art. Returning to Germany he founded the journal Blätter für die Kunst and became the centre of the George-Kreis, a circle of disciples who treated poetry as a near sacred calling. His own verse is formal, lyrical in tone and often deliberately arcane, and runs from the early collections Hymnen, Pilgerfahrten and Algabal through Das Jahr der Seele, Der siebente Ring and Der Stern des Bundes to his last book, Das neue Reich, in 1928. He was also an important translator of Dante, Shakespeare, Hesiod and Charles Baudelaire into German, and he received the first Goethe Prize in 1927.