NOVALIS: HYMNS TO THE NIGHT AND SPIRITUAL SONGS LARGE PRINT EDITION

Translated by George MacDonald

Edited and introduced by Carol Appleby

A new edition in large print of Novalis’ Hymns To the Night, and Spiritual Songs, translated by George MacDonald, with an introduction and notes by Carol Appleby.

Includes the German text.

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) is the most mystical of the German Romantic poets. He is at once the most typical and the most unusual of the German Romantic writers, indeed, of all Romantic poets. His best known work, Hymns To the Night, was published in 1800.

Novalis is supremely idealistic, far more so than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Heinrich Heine. He died young, which makes him, like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, something of a hero (or martyr). He did not write as much as Shelley, but his work, like that of Keats or Arthur Rimbaud, promised much. For Michael Hamburger, Novalis’ poetry is almost totally idealistic.

The translator of Hymns To the Night, Scottish fantasist George MacDonald (1824-95), included Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin among his literary friends. His well-known works were Phantastes (1858), Lilith (1895), Bannerman’s Boyhood and the Curdie children’s stories: The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1882). MacDonald’s books were a significant influence on both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Illustrated. Large print on cream paper. With bibliography and notes. 276 pages.

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