Nicklas David Soiné has studied Comparative Literature, French Language and Literature, Art History, and Modern German Literature in Berlin and Paris. He received his M.A. at Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on Dream and Vision in Dante and Victor Hugo. Currently, he is PhD candidate at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, working on his research project on Prophetic Poetry in Dante, John Milton, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Victor Hugo.

Poetry of Revelation. The Genealogy of Prophetic Poetry in Dante, John Milton, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Victor Hugo

The project, spanning several centuries of European literature, deals with the genealogic tradition of prophetic poetry in religiously inspired epic. The texts in question are Dante’s Commedia, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Der Messias, and Victor Hugo’s triptych La Légende des siècles - La Fin de Satan - Dieu. Starting from the general assumption that all these poets claim, in their poems, to sing from prophetic inspiration, the intention is to clarify in each case not only the nature of the text, but also the nature of the divine message the authors believed to have inscribed in their ‘propheto’-poetical texts, and, more particularly, the relationship their writings were meant to bear to the Holy Scripture in an ever more secularized world.