Platen was born on October 24, 1796, in Ansbach, Bavaria, the son of an impoverished nobleman. He attended the Military Academy at Munich (1806-1810) and the Royal Institute of Pages (1810-1814), resulting in his commission as a lieutenant in 1815 in a regiment against France during the time of Napoleon; he, however, engaged in no action.

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After a leave of absence in 1818, Platen studied at the University of Würzburg, transferring a year later to Erlangen, where he studied under the idealist philosopher of Romanticism, Friedrich Schelling, and made the acquaintance of many of the leading writers of the time including Goethe. Platen was extremely erudite, mastering a dozen languages, including literary Greek and Latin, French for social status, Persian for poetic reasons, and even English.

In 1821, Platen published Ghaselen, his first major collection of poems. In this work, he adopted the "ghasel," modeled after the Persian poet Hafiz's (1326-1390) verse. In 1824, Platen traveled to Italy, and in Venice, created Sonnets from Venice (Sonette aus Venedig, 1825), which are Petrarchan in form.

His Songs of the Poles (Polenlieder, 1831), expressing sympathy for the Poles in their rebellion against tyranny, are among the great classical poems of their time. His drama The Glass Slipper (Der gläserne Pantoffel, 1824) is a comedy with fairy tale elements.

An admirer of Michelangelo and Italian art, Platen visited Florence, Rome, Naples, Syracuse, and Sicily. While in Naples in the 1820s, he formed a friendship with the poet and painter August Kopisch, all the while perfecting the content and form of his poetry. By 1826, he had moved permanently to Italy, supported by a pension from his friend, King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Focusing his sexual urges into the artistic and creative realms, Platen transformed his passion for same-sex relations from the physical to the intellectual. On occasion, a friendship lasted only a year or so--for example, his intense relationship with a young painter, Rühl--but it nevertheless served to heighten his creative powers.

His controversial, multilingual, autobiographical narrative, which contains an explicitly erotic homosexual theme, was not published until the end of the nineteenth century, under the title Diary (Die Tagebücher, 1896-1900).

In his poetry, Platen employs a recurrent homoerotic image borrowed from Persian poetry, the tulip, which is a spiritual symbol for masculine love. Platen's longing for love and friendship is a persistent motif in his work.

He addressed seven sonnets to "Cardenio," an Erlangen student, who is described as a young, tall, dark, and handsome man with full lips. Platen addressed an additional twenty-one sonnets to another Erlangen student, "Karl Theodor German." Embodying themes of Platonic love, friendship, longing, idealism, and beauty, Platen's sonnets express unrequited love for men.

Platen's homosexuality is the subject of a vicious attack by Heinrich Heine in The Baths of Lucca (Die Bäder von Lucca, 1829). Edward Carpenter, however, expressed his appreciation for Platen in his Ioälus, An Anthology of Friendship (1902).

Among German writers who admired Platen is Thomas Mann, who praised him in a lecture in 1930; Platen's poem "Tristan" (1825) inspired Mann's novella Tristan and Isolde (1903). In 1985, the homosexual, avant-garde writer Hubert Fichte, published a noteworthy tribute to Platen, describing the poet as a "creative master like Whitman, Rimbaud, and Genet."

Although no biography of Platen has yet been written in English, his life is engaging while his art is captivating.

With major periodic setbacks, over the last two centuries German-speaking authors have gradually developed a gay and lesbian positive literature.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

Novelist Hubert Fichte was the first author to introduce homosexuality openly into German literature after World War II.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

Much of the sexuality in the lyrics of the great Persian poet Hafiz is homoerotic and infused with a homosexual mysticism.

One of Germany's greatest twentieth-century authors, Thomas Mann encoded his own homosexuality in his novels but thought that homosexuality led to the destruction of social institutions and the death of the individual homosexual.

Best known for his genius in art and architecture, Michelangelo was also an accomplished author of homoerotic poetry.

The most famous artist who ever lived, Michelangelo left an enormous legacy in sculpture, painting, drawing, architecture, and poetry; while the artist's sexual behavior cannot be documented, the homoerotic character of his drawings, letters, and poetry is unmistakable.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.