Alexander von Humboldt's dedication of his Essay on the Geography of Plants (1807) to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is an homage of the scientist to the poet whose essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) had shown how the concurrence of science and the creative spirit could unveil a perfect work of art inspired by nature, evoking admiration and awe for invisible forces yet to be discovered. While Humboldt's essay itself documents scientific botanical and ethnological observations and empirical data the author gained on his journey through South and Central America, its intermittent poetic language can be read as a response to Goethe's intellectual and creative life. Moreover, it can be argued that Humboldt seeks to emulate the creative spirit modeled by Goethe and defined by Novalis and Friedrich Schelling, namely, that nature can be mediated through the poetic spirit. For Humboldt, this poetic spirit is developed through experience, sharpened by a keen talent for observation, both achieved through the complete and total immersion in nature. For Goethe, Humboldt had lit science with an “aesthetic breeze” into a “bright flame.”

The interdependence of ethnography and the creative imagination, science and poetry, produced a body of work penned by writers who either relied on accounts disseminated by those who had encountered non-Western cultures or were drawing from their own experience as they had traveled to distant places themselves. For Humboldt and Goethe, science and poetry were not mutually exclusive, but rather drew inspiration from one another through the power of observation and contemplation of the ontology of the natural world. Whereas science questioned the material world to produce a deeper understanding of the laws of nature, the poetic vision transposed the beautiful and sublime into language that mediated what had been observed and disseminated in meticulously documented scientific writings, abundantly illustrated with incomparable artistic craftsmanship and beauty.

Humboldt, one of the most prominent ethnographers of his time, was one of several German scientists whose travel accounts, complemented by a growing corpus of similar scientific contributions introduced Europe and Germany in particular, to a new construct of an exoticized indigenous Other, which turned the Man of Nature into the Noble Savage.