His scientific pursuits and writings have merited Goethe a place in histories of science in the eighteenth century, and there is a great body of scholarship that documents his work in various scientific fields. Recent studies, part of a wider reevaluation of the development of science in Europe in the eighteenth century, have greatly assisted our understanding of the intellectual and sociological milieu in which Goethe's scientific pursuits took place and have largely erased the image of Goethe as a dilettante. Alongside studies of contemporary science in his various poetic works are those investigating the conceptual basis of Goethe's scientific thinking, thus amplifying “what connections he drew between art and the careful observation and assessment of the natural world.” Recent investigations have also focused on the interpenetration of philosophy, science, and art. A general consensus exists that the literary pursuits and the scientific ones cannot be separated, and few contemporary scholars would agree with Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), who argued that Goethe would have done better to follow the advice the mathematician Clairant gave to Voltaire, namely, to leave science to those who were not also great poets.

Nevertheless, largely absent in these studies is an investigation of what Hermann von Helmholtz, writing in 1853 in connection with Goethe's morphological works, characterized as the “dichterische Richtung geistiger Tätigkeit.” In considering what, exactly, is poetic about Goethe's science, I am interested in the specific influence of aesthetics, including literary conventions, on the shape or substance of the science.