ove upon it if
one went more into detail.

It seems to me under these conditions that the groundlines of the
development of our literature from 1700-1900 would be best impressed
upon us by comparing the order of its evolution with that of the most
"normal" poetic genius who ever lived--namely, with that of Goethe;
and thereby we should prove its development to be an essentially
normal one.

Like all "natural geniuses" Goethe begins as an imitator, dependent
upon others; for the poet also must first learn to speak and to walk.
The earliest literary effort of his which we possess is the poem _On
Christ's Descent into Hell_, which naturally seemed strange enough to
Goethe when this long forgotten first printed specimen of his literary
productiveness was laid before him again after he had grown old. In
this poem traditional phrases are repeated without the addition of
anything new and original; conventional feelings are expressed, usual
methods are employed; all this, however, not without a certain
moderation of expression constituting a first sign of the otherwise
still completely concealed poetic individuality.

Such is the character that the world of virtuosos also bears about the
year 1700. The poems of Rudolf von Canitz and Johann von Besser are,
though in entirely different spheres, just the same kind of first
attempts of an imperfect art anxiously following foreign models as
Goethe's first Christian poem--though truly with the tremendous
difference that they represented the utmost that Frenchified courtly
art could ever attain to; while Goethe's poem, on the contrary, was
the immature sprig cut away before its time from the stem of a tree
soon to stand in the full glory of its bloom.

When now in the Leipzig period the young student discovers the poet
within him, he first does so in the customary way: he recognizes the
ability on his part to handle the language of the contemporary poets,
and also perhaps to imbue it with his own personal feelings. His poems
inserted in letters, which make a show of the elegant pretence of
improvisation, but in reality already display a great dexterity in
rhyming and in the use of imagery, may be compared to Hagedorn's
poetry; but at the same time Goethe is trying to attain the serious
tone of the "Pindarian" odes, just as Haller's stilted scholarly
poetry conquered a place beside Hagedorn's Epicurean philosophy of
life. The _Book of Annette_ (1767) as a whole, however, presents