Approaching Goethe’s poetry

If we associate hexameter with Homer and Virgil, distichs with the Latin elegiac and satirical poets, terza rima, ottava rima, and the sonnet with Dante and the Italian Renaissance poets, the sonnet and iambic pentameter with Shakespeare, the alexandrine with Victor Hugo and even Baudelaire, there is no particular poetic form we can immediately associate with Goethe; he wrote in all these forms and many, many more. Indeed, Goethe's supreme gift is that of convincing the reader that his chosen lyrical form, and no other, is the appropriate one for the expression of a particular poetic statement. His historical situation at a vibrant stage in the development of German language and literature, a time when the culture was becoming self-consciously German and yet was also highly receptive to foreign influences, his position at the threshold of European Romanticism, which he did much to shape and further, determined the scope and variety of his eclectic lyrical output – allied with an outstanding gift of poetic articulation, a quasi-magical command of language that suggests, no doubt misleadingly, that he was someone to whom poetic expression came as easily and as naturally as eating or breathing. Poetic language and expression informs and characterizes the whole range of Goethe's writing, quite particularly his verse dramas, but also much of his prose fiction, his private correspondence, and even some of his scientific work, the results of which were frequently expressed in lyrical form, in verse epigrams, or in longer didactic poems.