This collection of articles emerged from a series of panels devoted to Goethe's lyric poetry at the Thirty-first Conference of the German Studies Association in 2010. The organizers, including Regina Sachers, were motivated by the observation that this genre of Goethe's writings has been surprisingly understudied in recent years. on the one hand, scholars have tended to revisit very similar questions raised by a comparatively small number of individual poems; only rarely have new contexts or innovative theoretical approaches been brought into play. On the other hand, David Wellbery's magisterial study The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996) has been received with such appreciation that scholars seem to have been discouraged from pursuing new directions in this area of research. Our aim was to bring together a wide variety of established and emerging Goethe scholars and take stock of the current innovative approaches to Goethe's lyric poetry. We are hopeful that the following articles, which (with one exception) have their origin in this panel series, will open up new avenues of research and poetic insight as they examine Goethe's lyric through various discursive lenses and from different theoretical angles.

The first three contributions propose new ways of reading Goethe's early poems that go beyond David Wellbery's methodology and assessments. Edgar Landgraf, meeting David Wellbery on his home turf, makes a strong argument that the discursive formation of Goethe's early poems is better understood if approached with a rigorous application of Luhmann's systems theory.