ABSTRACT
Eight years had passed by since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had attempted to put together his fragments of a poem on nature as the 'Hexameter zur Morphologie' and the volume of poetry of the first Cotta edition had appeared in print. During this time, Goethe had published his Farbenlehre (from 1808) and the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), but hardly any poetry. In the earlier poem 'Weltseele' Goethe's cosmology vaguely resembled the stages of the Christian creation story. Different degrees of interaction between the short maxims have replaced the monumentality of ancient poetic forms like the elegiac couplet or the hexameter. While such a Kantian distinction had already determined Elegien II, the interplay between objective and subjective elements sometimes appears technical. One of the collections that Goethe rearranged for the second Cotta edition was Gesellige Lieder. Working on this edition, Goethe had to incorporate a considerable amount of new poetry, excluding the Divan poems, which he always intended to publish separately.
