ABSTRACT
In 1821, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put together twenty-one poems overtly concerned with scientific themes in a collection entitled Gott und Welt for his Ausgabe letzter Hand. He followed a practice of editing his poetry that can be traced back to 1767 and the collection Annette, in which he arranged a few poems for his friend Behrisch. In a way G. von Loeper's and Düntzer's decision to assign every poem a specific place within Goethe's work can already point us to the root of why critical writing has been unable to respond to the challenges that Goethe's collections bring. Weimar's hermeneutic-interpretative approach certainly has a means to accommodate context as a factor in the poem's interpretation. Goethe's practice of grouping his poems in collections challenges the ideas of autonomous art and traditional hermeneutics. Goethe's indebtedness to ancient Greek thought or to ideas of seventeenth-century radical enlightenment tends to dominate critical writing on his poetry.
