August von Platen-Hallermünde

August von Platen-Hallermünde (Ansbach, 1796 - Syracuse, 1835) was a German poet and dramatist whose work sits between Romanticism and a demanding classical ideal. Born in Ansbach just as the town was absorbed into the Kingdom of Bavaria, he came from a family of officials and was trained as a cadet and page in Munich. He served briefly as an army officer, but his real interest was literature, and he left military life to study philosophy and philology at Würzburg and Erlangen, where he came under the influence of Schelling.

His first volumes of verse, drawing on Persian models and on the manner of Rückert, caught the eye of Goethe for their polish and restraint. Over time Platen turned away from the Romantic style he had started with and championed clarity of form. This led to satirical comedies in the manner of Aristophanes, aimed at what he saw as the excesses of the stage, and to odes and sonnets of great precision. His quarrel with Heinrich Heine became notorious: each attacked the other in print, and Heine went so far as to make Platen's homosexuality public.

From 1826 he lived in Italy, first in Florence, then in Rome and Naples, often short of money and content to think of himself as a wandering rhapsodist. His diary, written alternately in German and French, records his desires and his attachments to young men, and scholars now read it as an important source on how homosexual identities were understood. He died of cholera in Syracuse in December 1835, aged 39.

His reputation today rests on his odes and sonnets, which are admired for their finish. His afterlife is tied to Thomas Mann, who drew partly on Platen for the central figure of Death in Venice and wrote an essay on him in 1930 that shaped how readers saw him for decades.