The New International Encyclopædia/Voss, Johann Heinrich
VOSS,  (1751-1826). A
German poet, translator, and classical philologist,
born in Sommersdorf, Mecklenburg. He studied
at Göttingen, and after editing for a time the
Göttinger Musenalmanach, was made rector of
the Gymnasium at Otterndorf (1778). He
translated the Odyssey, was promoted in
1782 to the rectorship of the Gymnasium at Eutin,
and here in 1789 published a translation of Vergil's
Eclogues and Georgics, his classical version
of the Homeric poems (4 vols., 1793), and two
volumes of controversial letters addressed to
Heyne (Mythologische Briefe, 1794). In 1802 he

moved to Jena, and in 1805 was made professor
of classical literature at Heidelberg. Here he
translated Horace, Hesiod, Theocritus, Bion,
Moschus, and Tibullus, and attempted
Shakespeare, Ovid, and Aristophanes with less success.
Of his original poems in four volumes (1825) the
idyl Luise (1795) is alone noteworthy. His
later works, Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier
(1819) and Antisymbolik (1824-26), are painstaking
and dignified, but dreary. Voss's
Letters are in three volumes (Halberstadt, 1829-33).
Consult the Lives by Paulus (Heidelberg,
1826) and Herbst (Leipzig, 1872-76); also Prutz,
Der Göttinger Dichterbund (Leipzig, 1841).