Poets

Adelbert von Chamisso was a German poet and botanist.

He was born Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot at the château of Boncourt at Ante, in Champagne, France, the ancestral seat of his family. His name appears in several forms, one of the most common being Ludolf Karl Adalbert von Chamisso. Driven out by the French Revolution, his parents settled in Berlin, where in 1796 young Chamisso obtained the post of page-in-waiting to the queen, and in 1798 entered a Prussian infantry regiment as ensign.

Shortly thereafter, upon the Peace of Tilsit, his family was permitted to return to France; he remained in Germany and continued his military career. He had little education, and while in the Prussian military service in Berlin assiduously studied natural science for three years. In collaboration with Varnhagen von Ense, he founded (1803) the Berliner Musenalmanach, in which his first verses appeared. The enterprise was a failure, and, interrupted by the war, it came to an end in 1806. It brought him, however, to the notice of many of the literary celebrities of the day and established his reputation as a rising poet.

He had become lieutenant in 1801, and in 1805 accompanied his regiment to Hameln, where he shared in the humiliation of its treasonable capitulation in the following year. Placed on parole, he went to France, but both his parents were dead; returning to Berlin in the autumn of 1807, he obtained his release from the service early the following year. Homeless an..