“German poetry,” says Friedrich Kittler,“begins with a sigh.” Ach, the signifier of ineffability at the center of the German word for language (Sprache), launches, in this case, the spate of elegiac production most closely associated with Goethe's classical lyric.

Written from 12 to 14 May 1796 and published that October in the Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1797, Alexis und Dora would prove to be the first in a series of elegiac poems occupying Goethe's interest for the next two years: Herrmann und Dorothea (the elegy, not the epic), from the end of 1796; Der neue Pausias und sein Blumenmädchen, from May 1797; Amyntas, from September 1797; Euphrosyne, finished in June 1798; and Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, also from June 1798. If the grouping of these poems into a more or less coherent “classical phase” is a fiction of Goethe scholarship, it is a fiction that was begun by the poet himself.