His parents were poor and his early education had been much neglected. But his excellent talents attracted the attention of friends who interested themselves in his behalf and gave him an opportunity to study. Even his first poems were marked by great beauty of form and evinced a very rare command of language. This gave him access to the most refined circles, where his great personal amiability soon made him a general favorite. He gained the good will of the art-loving duke of Augustenburg to such a degree that the latter at his own expense sent the young poet to Germany, Switzerland and France, during which journey he made the acquaintance of the most celebrated poets and philosophers, such as Voss, Klopstock, Wieland, Schiller, Herder, Jacobi and others. He also studied Kant’s philosophy, which filled him with so great enthusiasm that he assumed the name Immanuel in honor of the great philosopher. The varied impressions made on his receptive and susceptible mind by all the new things he saw, Baggesen embodied in his greatest prose work, “Labyrinthen eller Digtervandringer” (2 vols. 1792-1793) a work distinguished for its vivid and graphic descriptions and for its sparkling humor. When he returned to Denmark the narrow conditions of his country no longer satisfied his enlarged intellectual horizon, and he already then entertained the thought of becoming a German poet. He did not remain long in Denmark, but soon went abroad again and journeyed from place to place, continually occupied with great plans which never, however, were realized. He was always planning, never at rest. Prom 1800 to 1811 he resided almost without interruption in Paris. In 1811 he was appointed professor of the Danish language at the University of Kiel, but already in 1813 he abandoned this position and returned to Copenhagen. Here he at once began his great literary war with Oehlenschläger, which was to cause him so much trouble and to estrange from him almost all his friends. Then he once more left Denmark never to see it again. He died in 1826 in Hamburg on his return from
