Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, quitting school on September 21, 1745, he had delivered a remarkable "departing oration" on epic poetry—Abschiedsrede über die epische Poesie, kultur- und literargeschichtlich erläutert—and next proceeded to Jena as a student of theology, where he drew up in prose the first three cantos of Der Messias, the epic poem upon which most of his fame rests.
Finding life at that university not to his liking, he had transferred in the spring of 1746 to Leipzig, where he joined a circle of young men of letters who contributed to the Bremer Beiträge, the designation for the weekly magazine Neue Beyträge zum Vergnügen des Verstandes und Witzes ("New contributions to the pleasure of the mind and wit").
In this periodical the first three cantos of Der Messias are published anonymously in hexameter verse in 1748.
A new era in German literature has commenced, and the identity of the author soon becomes known.
In Leipzig he has also written a number of odes, the best known of which is An meine Freund (1747) (afterwards recast as Wingolf in 1767).
He leaves the university in 1748 and becomes a private tutor in the family of a relative at Langensalza, where unrequited love for a cousin (the "Fanny" of his odes) disturbs his peace of mind.
Born at Quedlinburg as the eldest son of a lawyer, Klopstock had spent a happy childhood, both in his birthplace and on the estate of Friedeburg on the Saale, which his father later rented.
Having been given more attention to his physical than to his mental development, he had grown up strong and healthy and is considered an excellent horseman.
He had returned to Quedlinburg in his thirteenth year and attended the gymnasium there, and in 1739 went on to the famous classical school named Schulpforta, where he soon became adept in Greek and Latin versification, and wrote some meritorious idylls and odes in German.
Influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost, with which he had become acquainted through Bodmer's translation, he abandoned his original intention of making Henry the Fowler the hero of an epic in favor of a religious epic,
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