“As long as poets express merely their puny subjective impressions, they are not worth the name; but as soon as they know how to appropriate and express the world, they are poets. For then they are inexhaustible and can be constantly new, as opposed to a subjective nature, which quickly expresses its meagre inner life and in the end goes to ruin in affectation. One speaks of the study of antiquity: all the same what does that mean except to attend to the actual world and seek to express it: for that is what the ancients did as long as they lived.”

Goethe stood up and walked back and forth in the room, while I remained sitting in my chair at the table, which was something he liked. He stood a moment at the stove, then however, like someone who has considered something, approached me and said with a finger near his mouth:

“I will let you in on something, and you will find it confirmed many times over in your lifetime. All historical periods that are engaged in backsliding and dissolution are subjective, while all periods that advance have an objective tendency. The time in which we live is wholly backsliding, for it is a subjective one. You see this not only in poetry, but also in painting and much else. By contrast every valiant striving turns from its inner life towards the world, as you see in all great historical epochs, which were truly engaged in striving and advancing and were of an objective nature.”

Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 29 January 1826