Between 1817 and 1819, the year when the Divan appeared, several successive phases of development took place.
Goethe’s lyrical work was publicized by an announcement in Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände on 24 February 1816, as also by preprints in the morning paper of 22 March 1816 and in the Taschenbuch für Damen auf das Jahr 1817. Between 1817 and 1819, the year when the Divan appeared, several successive phases of development took place. The last phase included the prose section, which in the first edition of 1819 bore the title Besseren Verständnis. Since certain passages seemed to be incomprehensible to his readers, Goethe decided to supplement them with commentary (Goethe, 1994, pp. 555-63). Hammer’s Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens reached him on 3 May 1818, and kept him busy studying the history of Persian and Oriental literature until late June (Goethe, 1994, pp. 279, 1405); this was a primary source of his commentary (Solbrig, pp. 165-91). In early June 1818 the first drafts on Persian culture were prepared; on 17 September the outline for the Besseren Verständnis was completed.