Explores the central theme of Romantic poetry in the works of the most important German Romantic poet of all. Goethe, in association with his younger Romantic compatriots the Schlegels, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling, struggled with the subject-object dichotomy, and tried to bridge the gap between self and other, consciousness and nature.His theory and practice prefigured the Romantics' determination to display and interrogate the linguistic...