National poet

National poet (also " national poet ") is an honorific attribute that has no fixed definition. There are both official appointments in the tradition of crowning poets ( Gottfried Keller, for example, was raised in 1889 by the Swiss Federal Council to the rank of national poet, even the British Queen appoints always a Poet Laureate ), and unofficial write-ups in the mass media. Even local celebrities such as the Frankfurt Adolf Stoltze sometimes carry the attribute. Common property is the popular acclaim by public opinion. A historical root for the canonization as the " national poet / in " seems to be the new conception of "the people" in the Romantic ( influential: Johann Gottfried Herder) to be based primarily on those - often small - had European nations, which under Prince - or foreign rule stood, and which in their own language effectively writing authors gave a voice.

As typical representatives of about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ( Germany ), William Shakespeare ( England ), Robert Burns ( Scotland), Dante Alighieri (Italy ), Alexander Pushkin ( Russia), Adam Mickiewicz (Poland), Miguel de Cervantes (Spain ) Alexandre Dumas ( France), Hristo Botev (Bulgaria) or Luís de Camões (Portugal ), but also several authors in some countries marked with this attribute.

In the 18th and 19th century, the collection of the respective " national poet " or the national literature was a common element of the nationalist propaganda. In the era of National Socialism there were attempts to substandard ethnic writers such as Dietrich Eckart to raise with the help of conformist media to the rank of the national poet, whereby the term was canceled in the German part.