Wilhelm Müller

Born Oct. 7, 1794, in Dessau; died there Sept. 30, 1827. German author.

The son of a shoemaker, Müller studied philology, philosophy, and history at the University of Berlin. He served in the Prussian Army during the war against Napoleon (1813–14). In 1816 he published his Anthology of Minnesingers, a collection of poetry inspired by ancient German love songs. He published his impressions of travels in Italy in his epistolary work Rome, Roman Men and Women (vols. 1–2, 1820). Between 1821 and 1824, Müller published well-known cycles of poems about the plight of Greece under the Turkish yoke. He was the author of more than 300 epigrams in the spirit of Goethe’s and Schiller’s Xenien.