Johann Georg Jacobi was an important figure of German belles lettres during the 1770s and 1780s. Although his poetry matured and developed beyond the anacreontic style in which he began, he has been unjustly seen as a frenchifying versifier in the style of Jean-Baptist-Louis Gresset and the Abbé de Chaulieu (Guillaume Amfrye). Although he experimented with several genres, Jacobi was most successful as a lyric poet whose self-description as a "little singer of small songs" seems quite accurate. His work falls into three phases: the youthful anacreontic phase; a more mature and serious phase beginning at about his thirty-fifth year, based on influence from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and a love affair with his cousin Caroline Jacobi; and the mature phase in Freiburg. While he wrote of ordinary things, his poems display smoothness and appropriateness of form; his language is polished, unforced, and euphonious. His strength is in...