Ulrich Bollinger, ? -- 1609, Imperial Poet Laureate And Guy With Same Last Name As Me

Ulrich Bollinger was a poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire from not later than 1596 until 1609.

I... don't know how to feel about this.

I say that Ulrich Bollinger was a poet laureate of the Empire and not the poet laureate of the Empire, because it seems that there were 1300 poets laureate of the Empire altogether, which means there were more than 1 at a time.

The philologist, poet, playwright, mathematician, and astronomer Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin was Bollinger's mentor. Frischlin, besides becoming both a poet laureate and a no-foolin' count before the age of 30 as reward for his brilliant writing, seems to have repeatedly gotten into trouble for having a big mouth. I don't know what the problem was, more specifically than that Frischlin kept saying or writing things which more prudent people did not, and that because of this he had to move, or flee, from Tübingen to Ljubljana to Frankfurt am Main to Strasbourg to Marburg to Mainz. In 1590 he was arrested and imprisoned in a fortress near Reutlingen, and the same year, barely 43 years old, he died in an attempt to escape.

It seems that Ulrich Bollinger is more well known for his relationship with the brilliant and reckless Frischlin, and specifically for the edition and publication in 1599 of Frischlin's Hebraeis, an epic 6000 verses long based on stories from the Old Testament, than for anything else.