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 the
first attempt on the part of Goethe to reach a certain completeness in
his treatment of the poetic theme. In all his subsequent collections
of poems the same attempt is made, it is true with increasingly rigid
interpretation of the idea of "completeness," and in so far one is
reminded in this connection of the theoretic intentions and
performances of Gottsched.

The "New Songs" (_Neue Lieder_) of 1770 give a lop-sided exhibition of
the style which Leipzig and the times acts. Two great acts follow: in
1773 comes _Götz_; in 1774, _Werther_. And with _Götz_ the great
"subjects of humanity" seize possession of Goethe's poetry, as they
had taken possession of the poetry of Germany with Lessing--as shown
by his whole work up to _Nathan_: for Lessing, the strongest adversary