Goethe's post-anacreontic poetry “fundamentally alter[ed] the nature of poetic writing, inaugurating a type of literary discourse that, from a European perspective, can be called the Romantic lyric.” Thus argues David Wellbery in “Idyllic and Lyric Intimacy” the introductory essay of The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism Wellbery does not read the Romantic lyric in the poetological tradition it generated, a tradition that is “in essence tautological, drawing on, and reinforcing, the mythical values—‘nature,’ ‘force,’ ‘youth,’ ‘unmediated song’—the texts themselves set into circulation” (7); rather he approaches Goethe's early poetry as a particular discursive practice that produces the effects of which it speaks. A comparison of Goethe's “Maifest” with passages from Salomon Geßner's sentimental idylls reveals the “discursive mutations” the changes in the pragmatic, the fictional, the temporal, and the semantic structures that generate the “new enunciative modalities and strategies of reading” (11) associated with the Romantic lyric. While the comparison with Geßner focuses on particular changes in literary writing, the epochal significance Wellbery attributes to Goethe's poetry from the 1770s is not restricted to literary history; rather, Wellbery draws on Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Niklas Luhmann to recognize the broad social relevance of Goethe's writing technique. It is said to have changed “the field of intimate communications” and to have helped reorganize intimacy itself (see 10-11). Furthermore, the structure of the lyric that “crystallize[s] into the signature of a historical emergence” (3) around Goethe's poetry is not restricted to the Romantic period.