Andreas Gryphius and
Paul Fleming, gnomologists like Johann Scheffler, and narrators like
J.J. Christoffel von Grimmelshausen; but even with them the personal
note does not dare to sound openly. The first to give free expression
again to intimate sensations is Christian Guenther, and he arouses
thereby contradiction, together with admiration. The court poets about
the year 1700 work more in a negative way, i. e., by that which they
did not express in their verses. The great merit of the pre-classical
writers is to have created space, on the one hand, for personal
sensations, and, on the other, for the great new thoughts of the age.
Hagedorn, with the elegant frivolity of the man of the world,
continued the necessary sifting of antiquated material; Albrecht von
Haller, with the deep seriousness of the great student of nature, once
more squarely faced the eternal problems. But the entire wealth of
inner experience, in its most exclusively individual sense, was first
revealed, not only to the literature of Germany but to modern
literature in general, by Klopstock. Along this path Goethe pressed
forward gloriously, his whole poetic work presenting, according to his
own testimony, a single great confession. From Haller, on the
contrary, proceeds the effort to develop a poetical style that would
enable individuals to share in the great thoughts of the age. Lessing
strides onward from _Minna von Barnhelm_--the first drama of
contemporary history since the _Persians_ of AEschylus--to _Nathan the
Wise_, herein following the lead of the "literature with a distinct
purpose" (_Tendenz-Dichtung_) of France, and especially of Voltaire,
otherwise antipathetic to Lessing. Lessing's great dramatic heir is
Schiller, whose tradition is in turn carried on by Kleist, the latter
allowing his personality to penetrate the subject matter far more even
than either of his predecessors.

But the utmost was done by Goethe, when in _Werther_ and _Goetz_, in
_Prometheus_ or _Satyros_, but above all eventually in _Faust_, he
lived through in advance--or, as he himself said, he "anticipated"
(_vorfuehlte_)--the peculiar experience of the age with such intensity
that, in the work which resulted, the individual experience became the
direct experience of the whole generation.

Out of the "reverence for nature" (_Naturfroemmigkeit_) with which he
contemplated all created things--from "the Cedar of Lebanon to the
hyssop which grows on the wall," from the