An anthology of German literature
By Calvin Thomas
This book is designed to accompany an introductory study of the history of German literature. It is assumed that the history itself will be learned, so far as necessary, either from lectures or some other book devoted to the subject. I have tried to make a good anthology for students who have learned to read the language of Goethe and Schiller with some facility and would like to know something of the earlier periods but have not studied and may not care to study Old and Middle German.
On this account, the selections in Part First are given in modern German translations. The original texts are omitted because space was very precious, and the book was intended as an aid to literary rather than linguistic study. In making the selections, my first principle was to give a good deal of the best rather than a little of everything. I wished to make friends with medieval German poetry, and it seemed to me that this could best be done by showing it in its strength and its beauty. So, I have ignored much that might have had a historical or linguistic interest for the scholar and have steadily applied the criterion of literary worth.
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Calvin Thomas
Calvin Thomas (October 28, 1854, near Lapeer, Michigan – November 4, 1919, in New York City) was an American scholar who taught Germanic languages and literature at the University of Michigan and Columbia University.
Biography
Thomas graduated from the University of Michigan in 1874 with a Bachelor of Arts. He taught Latin and Greek at the Grand Rapids High School for a while, after which he studied philology at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1877/1878. His studies ended abruptly when he responded to a request from the University of Michigan to return and teach German. In 1886, he became professor of Germanic languages at Michigan. In 1896, he moved to fill the same chair at Columbia University. Professor Thomas did a great job of introducing the study of German into US public schools. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America from 1896 to 1897 and the American Dialect Society from 1912 to 1913.
He was also involved in the simplified spelling movement and was chair of Theodore Roosevelt’s Simplified Spelling Board. The University of Michigan gave him an LL.D. in 1904. In addition, he was an editor and contributing editor, along with Frank Horace Vizetelly, of the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia and Dictionary in the early 20th century. After his first wife, Mary J. Sutton of Lapeer, died the year they were married (1880), he married Mary Eleanor Allen of Grand Rapids in 1884. They had two children.
Calvin Thomas
