In this sense, Goethe's lyric can be seen to constitute one of Romanticism's earliest and most significant beginnings. The author contends that the ideas they articulated were first worked through in Goethe's astonishingly bold poetic experimentation.

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 shows, on the contrary, that Goethe's lyric work circles around a core set of problems and figures, that it evinces a systematic coherence until now unperceived despite an enormous interpretive literature. This marks a decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which has tended to view his poetry as the expression of occasional experiences.

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. Remarkably enough, no study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has been published in English in the last fifty years. 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.

Specular reflection lyrics