The article deals with August von Platen’s – an outstanding German romantic poet (1796–1835) – search for sources of inspiration, using ‘close reading’ as a basic interpretative method in gender poetics. In this article, for this purpose, the so-called Goethe’s ‘gender canon’, embracing specific Goethe’s works created between 1774 and 1821, was analyzed. This period of Goethe‘s creativity is a subject of fierce controversies in contemporary literary criticism, but specifically this period proved to be the most important for Platen’s formation as a minority poet.