In this book, the author has three aims: (1) to elaborate an
interpretation of Goethe's lyric poetry adequate to the intricacies of
its subject matter; (2) to demonstrate the significance of that poetry
to the development of European Romanticism; (3) to establish a method of
inquiry that weaves together the major strands of theoretical reflection
in modern literary studies. No study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has
been published in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of
this poetry the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an
English readership to a major body of work; rather, the book delineates
for the first time in any language an account of the symbolic network or
organizing myth that underlies Goethe's individual poems. This marks a
decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which has tended to
view his poetry as the expression of occasional experiences. The author
shows, on the contrary, that Goethe's lyric work circles around a core
set of problems and figures, that it evinces a systematic coherence
unperceived until now. In the literature on European Romanticism,
consideration of the German contribution has typically been restricted
to the theoretical work of the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, and
philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel. The author contends that the
ideas they articulated were first worked through in Goethe's bold poetic
experimentation.