He was born in
Hamburg and educated at the
Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums. He studied
jurisprudence at
Halle, and after extensive travels in
Italy, France and the
Netherlands, settled in Hamburg in 1704. In 1720 he was appointed a member of the
Hamburg senate, and entrusted with several important offices. Six years (from 1735 to 1741) he spent as
Amtmann (bailiff) at Ritzebüttel. He died in Hamburg. Brockes' poetic works were published in a series of nine volumes under the fantastic title
Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (1721–1748); he also translated
Giambattista Marino's
La Strage degli innocenti (1715),
Alexander Pope's
Essay on Man (1740) and
James Thomson's
The Seasons (1745). His poetry has small intrinsic value, but it is symptomatic of the change which came over German literature at the beginning of the 18th century. His
libretto Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (1712), also known as the
Brockes Passion, was one of the first
passion oratorios—a free, poetic meditation on the
passion. It was quite popular and was set to music by
Reinhard Keiser (1712),
Georg Philipp Telemann (1716),
George Frideric Handel (1716),
Johann Mattheson (1718),
Johann Friedrich Fasch (1723),
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1725), and
Johann Caspar Bachofen (1759), among others. He was one of the first German poets to substitute for the bombastic imitations of Marini, to which he himself had begun by contributing, a clear and simple diction. He was also a pioneer in directing the attention of his countrymen to the new poetry of nature which originated in England. His verses, artificial and crude as they often are, express a reverential attitude towards nature and a religious interpretation of natural phenomena which was new to German poetry and prepared the way for
Klopstock. ==References==