ABSTRACT
Few are the men of letters whose importance rests on so slender an auvre as does that of Wilhelm Wackenroder (1773-98). He had nothing that could be called a literary career: he died at the age of twenty-four, and his contribution to literature consists merely of a handful of short essays and sketches on virtually one single theme. Yet this fragile, insubstantial figure, at odds with his domestic environment and with the demands of a professional career, has come to hold a significance far greater than that which his slight literary remains seem meant to bear, a significance which, sensed already by his Romantic contemporaries, has become only more evident to succeeding ages.
