ABSTRACT
About the year 1840 Freiligrath was the most popular poet in Germany. Devoted to the ideal of 'pure art', he held it to be unworthy of the poet to descend into the contemporary arena. In Marx's opinion Freiligrath was 'an enemy of Herwegh's and of freedom'. Freiligrath's poetic powers reached their zenith in the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849 and he was one of Marx's closest collaborators on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Freiligrath was one of the few men whom Marx 'loved as friends in the highest sense of the word'. At the beginning of May, 1846, Marx and Engels sent the greater part of the manuscript to Germany. At the time, however, he bore the blow heavily. But it all lay a long time behind him when he wrote: 'We left the manuscript to the nibbling criticism of mice all the more willingly as we had attained our chief aim - clarification'.
