poet whose works were among the most influential expressions of the early Enlightenment in Germany.

The scion of a wealthy patrician family, he traveled widely before becoming a merchant in his hometown. In 1720 he was appointed a member of the Hamburg senate, and in 1735 he became a magistrate in Ritzebüttel. Influenced by the 18th-century British poets James Thomson and Alexander Pope, whose works he translated, he wrote nature poetry, such as Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (1721–48; “Earthly Pleasure in God”), in which natural phenomena are described minutely and seen as aspects of God's perfectly ordered universe. One of the first German poets to treat nature as a principal subject, he was the forerunner of the new poetic attitude toward nature in German literature that culminated in the works of Ewald Christian von Kleist (Kleist, Ewald Christian von) and Albrecht von Haller (Haller, Albrecht von).