Voß, Johann Heinrich

Johann Heinrich Voß, German classicist and poet, 1751-1826

Johann Heinrich Voss was a German classicist and poet, known mostly for his translation of Homer's Odyssey (1781) and Iliad (1793) into German. He also translated Hesiod (1806), the whole of Virgil (1799, rev. ed. 1821), Horace (1806), Tibullus (1810), Propertius (1830) and selections from Ovid (1798). From 1818 to 1829, a translation of William Shakespeare's plays in 9 volumes was published. An edition of his poems in four volumes was issued in 1825. Of these original works, the idyllic poem "Luise", is uniformly singled out as his most successful. In this work, he sought to apply the style and methods of classical poetry to the expression of modern German thought and sentiment.