The German symbolist artist Max Klinger (1857-1920) took inspiration from Brahms to create his Brahmsphantasie, a book of music and images that took Brahms’ music to a level never before seen. In his Brahmsphantasie, Klinger divided the work into 3

“For Our Generation Walks as in Hades, Without the Divine” German idealist poets and thinkers working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were primarily concerned with the descent of the French revolution into Bonapartism, noting Germany’s failure to

Can you imagine naming a whole class of trains after composers? That’s what British Rail did with its Class 92 electric locomotives. From Beethoven to Wagner (or, so cite British composers, from Britten to Sullivan), the names of composers from

Today, as we celebrate the 250th birthday of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), we consider him among the greatest of German lyric poets. During his lifetime, however, Hölderlin gained little recognition—he was a colleague of Hegel and Schelling—and he was almost totally

Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) started his career as a porcelain painter. However, the young man had clearly grander ambitions, and he soon found himself in the company of the academic artist Charles Gleyre, Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. The

When Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was elected President in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. The American Civil War lasted for

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) has been called “America’s poet,” and he is considered the father—not the inventor—of free verse. One of the most influential bards, he produced literature of timelessness that appealed to the American idea of democracy and equality. Believing

While sitting in his prison cell in Mons city jail, Verlaine drew sketches and composed what many literary critics consider to be his finest poetry. Incarcerated for shooting his fellow poet and lover Arthur Rimbaud, his time in jail isolated