The Hamburg poet and thinker Barthold Heinrich Brockes wrote perhaps the most extensive poetic work in German literature, the nine-volume collection Earthly Delight in God (1721–1748), in which he created one of the key bridges between German Baroque and Enlightenment, as well as between the concepts of Enlightenment philosophical-religious thought and beautiful literature. He represents a spiritual and social movement in Hamburg, which, due to the infiltration of Western European trends, formed the 'avant-garde' of Enlightenment modernization of German culture. However, after the Storm and the Defiance, Brockes's work fell into obscurity and suffers to this day from neglect or interpretative distortions. The presented book interprets it against the backdrop of German and specifically Hamburg spiritual history of the 18th century and shows its modern features, which brought Brockes extraordinary popularity in his time.
