Despite the popular image of “scientific revolutions,” suggesting that knowledge moves forward in great convulsive leaps, historians of science since Thomas Kuhn have shown us what real scientists have always known: progress comes bit by bit through detailed research. This relatively slim volume is the result of such painstaking investigation, and will eventually be seen as an important element in forging radical reinterpretation of eighteenth-century German poetry.

Meredith Lee is concerned here with two different yet linked issues. One is the recovery of the importance of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock for his contemporary readers and for the following generation. Going beyond the familiar history of the impact that Klopstock’s Der Messias had, Lee reveals the importance of Klopstock’s odes and elegies for the development of a new German lyric sensibility, attested in the responses of Herder, Gerstenberg, Boie, and Schubart. The second issue is how Klopstock became a model for Goethe and in particular how Klopstock’s lyrical experiments would reverberate in and through Goethe’s works as he was beginning to find his poetic voice in the early 1770s.

This elegantly written and cogently organized book offers more than good literary history, however. When she turns to specific readings of poems, whether Klopstock’s or Goethe’s, the interpretations are continually illuminating. Everyone who enjoys Goethe’s poems or who teaches them will want to read the sections on major poems such as “An Schwager Kronos,” “Wanderers Sturmlied,” and “Ganymed.” The closing chapter on “The Poet as Ice Skater” might be particularly appealing to Canadians, as it outlines the emergence of a new topos for European literature in poems by Klopstock and then shows how Goethe made skating a theme for personal and poetic liberation. Comparatists will draw upon the same material in considering the famous ice-skating scene in Wordsworth’s Prelude.

Counterbalancing Goethe’s admiration for Klopstock, which began furtively in childhood, there is a steady if gradual distancing as time goes along. In Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, Lee argues, Goethe more or less breaks with the domination of Klopstock’s pathos. Careful analysis shows how Klopstock’s style is parodied there in the excesses of the Ossian passages.

Of course, there are moments where the focus on Klopstock is a bit too narrow for a complete picture of Goethe’s poetic evolution. For example, Goethe’s intense involvement with the Old Testament as poetry, culminating in the translation of the Song of Songs, needs to be read in the context of Goethe’s reception of Gottfried Arnold as well as of the Psalms. Lee makes an unexpected connection to Sterne, pointing to a parallel between a passage in A Sentimental Journey and “An Schwager Kronos” (119–20), but by the same token one might look more closely at the connection to Book VII of Tristram Shandy.

The careful bibliography and three indices are exemplary, as befits this excellent contribution to our fuller understanding of one of the most important periods of German literary history.

ARND BOHM Carleton University