in form and treatment. Poetry and individual poets receive grateful
consideration, the seasons are overworked, love rarely fails and
nature never, wine and the Rhine are not forgotten, and the South is
poetized as the land of undying inspiration. Of their kind, and in
their way, Loeben's poems are nearly perfect.[25] There are no
expressions that repel, no verses that jar, no poems that wholly lack
fancy, and there are occasional evidences of the inspiration that
rebounds. It would be presumptuous to ask for a more amiable poem than
"Frühlingstrost" (46), or for a neater one than "Der Nichterhörte"
(121), or for a more gently roguish one than the triolett[26] entitled
"Frage" (55).

But be his poems never so good, there is no reason why Loeben should
be revived for the general reader. His prose works lack artistic
measure and objective plausibility; his lyrics lack clarity and
virility; his creations in general lack the story-telling property
that holds attention and the human-interest touches that move the
soul. His thirty-nine years were too empty of real experience;[27] his
works are not filled with the matter that endures. And it is for this
reason that they ceased to live after their author had died. His
connection with this earth was always just at the snapping-point. His
works constitute, in many instances, a poetic rearrangement of what he
had just latterly read. And when he is original he is vacuous. To
emphasize his works for their own sake would consequently be to set up
false values. Loeben can be studied with profit only by those people
who believe that great poets can be better understood and appreciated
by a study of the literary than by a study of the economic background.
To know Loeben[28] throws light on some of his much greater
contemporaries--Goethe, Eichendorff, Kleist, Novalis, Arnim, Brentano,
Uhland, Görres, Tieck, and possibly Heine.