Austrian Romantic poet
Nikolaus
Lenau
1802 – 1850
A restless son of the Banat who crossed an ocean looking for freedom, came back disappointed, and gave the German language some of its most melancholy verse.
Nikolaus Lenau was the pen name of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau, born in 1802 in the village of Csatád in the Banat — the place now called Lenauheim, in western Romania. He wrote in German and is counted among the great lyric poets of Austria.
Trained in philosophy, law and medicine but never at home in any of them, he chose poetry instead. His work is the purest German expression of Weltschmerz, the world-weary pessimism that runs from Byron to Leopardi. Even his long epics on Faust, Savonarola and the Albigensians read, at heart, like lyric poems.
In 1844 a mental collapse ended his writing life. He spent his last six years in asylums near Vienna and died in 1850 — yet composers from Schumann to Strauss kept his voice alive in music.