Anton Sommer (11 December 1816 - 1 June 1888) was a dialect poet from

Thuringia Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million. Erfurt is the capital and larg ...

(now in central Germany). He was born and died in

Rudolstadt Rudolstadt is a town in the German federal state Thuringia, with the Thuringian Forest to the southwest, and to Jena and Weimar to the north. The former capital of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, the town is built along the River Saale inside a wide va ...

Life

Between 1835 and 1838 Sommer studied theology in

Jena Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a popu ...

, after which he turned to teach. In 1850 he returned to his hometown and established a school of his own. He was authorized to preach in the small church in Schaala, now a quarter within

. In 1861 he was appointed garrison preacher in Rudolstadt, and it was here, by now half-blind and from 1881 recognized as an "honored citizen", that he died. Sommer's compilation "''Bilder und Klänge aus Rudolstadt in Volksmundart''" ("Images and sounds from Rudolstadt in local dialect"), repeatedly updated during his lifetime, was relatively well known for several decades after his death {{DEFAULTSORT:Sommer, Anton 19th-century German poets 19th-century German male writers German poets 1816 births 1888 deaths