IN THE NOTEN UND ABHANDLUNGEN to the Divan, Goethe suggests repeatedly that poetry should be regarded as a natural function of the life of its language, rather than as an expressive endeavor carried out by an individual in language considered as a neutral or transparent medium with no inherent content of its own. “Hier sieht man, daß die Sprache schon an und für sich productiv ist,” he says, about Arabic as a poetic language, “und zwar, in so fern sie dem Gedanken entgegen kommt, rednerisch, in so fern sie der Einbildungskraft zusagt, poetisch.” He asserts, “daß … die Sprache als Sprache die erste Rolle spielt” (7:106), and suggests that even our personal feelings, our putatively unique experiences as individuals, are “ewig wiederkehrend” (7:130), and so may plausibly be regarded as in truth the property of a communal order of which language is the primary outward form and our individuality merely an organ. Nor may we dismiss this idea as referring only to near eastern poetry.

The cultural strategy of the Divan, in any case, the tension between its self-consciously German and its self-consciously Eastern quality, has the effect of exhibiting precisely the German language to German readers as if it were a foreign language, and so focuses the reader's specifically linguistic awareness upon his or her own situation.