This monograph is the substantially revised and expanded version of the author's dissertation. It presents a comprehensive study of Goethe's early hymns—I follow Weber's own nomenclature here (14n8)—as they were assembled by Goethe himself around 1777 in the unpublished “Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung” (EWG). Weber argues that this collection not only contains the most authoritative versions of the poems but also is the result of a (more or less explicit) systematic plan with which Goethe attempted to bring into existence the poetic idea(l) that guided the formation (Bildung) of his poetic genius, with each poem simultaneously being a performative act and a self-reflection of the creative spirit. Weber's study is divided into three parts: a theoretical-methodological examination of the logic of poetic production, an analysis of the intertextual allusions of the individual poems, and a reflection on the ensemble that lets the reader experience, in its intracontextual (“intra-kontextuell,” 146) constellation, the “pure phenomenon” of the poetic spirit.

Weber fleshes out how Goethe's poems negotiate and accomplish the emergence of the poetic paradigm of autonomy—that is, the production and reception of literature based on a creative imagination that is freed from the theological and philosophical ideologies and institutions of the eighteenth century yet avoids the dangers of solipsistic excess. The “‘Vernünftigkeit’ oder Poeto-Logik” (15–16) of the creative spirit cannot be represented within the confines of a single poem but rather materializes only in the “metapoetics” of the EWG cycle, where the various poems taken together allow for reflection on the promises and limits of autonomous production. Weber argues that the cycle presents Goethe's own version of a poetic Critique of the Imagination as complement to Kant's work and precursor to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, a poetic critique that escapes discursive thought and rational cognition. Poetry actively materializes products that are individual moments of the poetic spirit, a spirit whose essence can be aesthetically experienced, hermeneutically achieved, and intuitively accessed only in the ensemble of a poetic cycle.