SOURCE: "The Flowering of the Narrative Cycle: Uhland, Wilhelm Müller, Heine," in The Lyric Cycle in German Literature, King's Crown Press, 1946, pp. 78-113.

In the following excerpt, Mustard contends that most of Müller's cycles lack unity and cohesion because the individual poems were not written with a specific cycle structure in mind but rather were only incorporated into a given cycle after composition.

Wilhelm Müller is one of the few poets whose entire lyric production tends to be cyclic. All the poems which Müller himself published in his collections are arranged in groups with descriptive titles, such as Reiselieder, Ländliche Lieder, Lieder aus dem Meerbusen von Salerno, Ständchen in Ritornellen aus Albano, etc.¹⁴ Not all of these groups can be called true cycles, but the cyclic tendency is apparent even in those which are the most diffuse.

Among his earliest cycles is...