Two humanities scholars at Goethe University have secured "Opus Magnum" funding from the Volkswagen Foundation; both are focusing on lyric poetry. For a period of eighteen months, they will be able to dedicate themselves entirely to their respective major research topics. Romance scholar Christine Ott is examining homoerotic poetic communities of the early modern period, while Sinologist Zhiyi Yang is researching the evolution of Chinese poetry in the internet age.

Until now, the fact that the painter and sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti wrote love poems to young men was considered unique—and his poetry the first major collection of texts in the vernacular to articulate such forbidden feelings. At the time, homosexual acts could be punished by death, providing ample reason to keep such inclinations secret. Christine Ott, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Goethe University, intends to demonstrate in a forthcoming book that Michelangelo was by no means the only man to take this risk. Under the title "Michelangelo and His Brothers: Homoerotic Poetry in the Early Modern Period," she aims to analyze previously unexplored sources from 14th to 16th-century Italy and show that poetic communities in which relationships between men played a role had formed approximately 150 years before Michelangelo. "I am interested in the function of these poems and how they were received and passed down," explains Christine Ott, who also plans to publish an edition of approximately 100 selected short texts. She is already convinced that the concepts of masculinity contained therein will proof surprisingly relevant. Her research is made possible by the Opus Magnum funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, which exempts her from university teaching obligations for eighteen months by providing a replacement.
Sinologist Prof. Zhiyi Yang is also focusing on poetry for her Opus Magnum, though her work concerns Chinese poetry from a more recent era. She aims to correct the current narrative of Chinese poetic history. Until now, literary scholarship assumed that traditional poetry had been displaced by formally and linguistically free poetry starting in 1917. Yang, however, is convinced that traditional poetry—characterized by strict rhythm and meter—continued to be practiced even after the New Culture Movement. Furthermore, since the late 1990s, the rapid development of the Chinese-language internet both inside and outside China has revitalized the writing of poems in classical genres according to pre-modern rules. Non-professionals began imitating traditional forms, in stark contrast to the official poetry of literary modernism. This eventually led to an avant-garde movement of lyrical classicism that combined classical tradition with literary modernism. "It is a kind of chimerical, rare, magical animal, born in chat rooms and bulletin board systems (BBS)," Yang describes. Tech-savvy young poets outside the literary establishment founded a new direction online with like-minded peers—just as AI-generated verses began to threaten their sense of originality and authenticity. This poetry is strictly classical in meter, modern in language, modernist in aesthetics, and subversive in ideology. However, the encrypted criticism and subversion it contains are now threatened by the censorship capabilities of artificial intelligence. Zhiyi Yang also plans a trip to China as preparatory work for her book, stating that it is essential to establish direct contact with poets rather than interacting with them solely via the internet.