A review of Hesse's prose and poetry reveals three distinct periods. Each represents a different stage in the course of the author's struggle with himself and with life as a whole, and each reflects a correspondingly different phase in his style.

The first of these three periods, the two decades preceding Demian …, is one of uncertainty and vague presentiment. These are the early years of a sensitive outsider who cannot cope directly with his particular problem of existence. He resorts instead to fantasy and withdraws into the realm of beauty, there to indulge in the extremes of late nineteenth-century aestheticism. The first prose of these years (Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht, 1899, Hermann Lauscher, 1901) is enveloped in a perfumed melancholy. It is characterized by exclamatory remarks and rhetorical questions, by sensuous adjectives and adverbs in languid cadence. The form is loose, a random succession of vignettes and dramatic monologues held together primarily by their common spirit of decadent romanticism. Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht is notable for its affected heroic pose, its pathos, profuse colors, and its muted sounds. Hermann Lauscher, a Hoffmannesque fusion of fantasy and reality, is both cynical and morbidly intimate. This is the work of a talented beginner whose world of experience is still too limited, and whose imagination is entranced by the facile flow of beautiful language. In the absence of discipline and restraint, the whole is sacrificed to the part, and what was meant to be art fails to become more than picturesque patter. (p. 14)

[This] initial, emotionally intense romanticism yields abruptly to a hardier, more entertaining realism…. The dream world of Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht and Hermann Lauscher is succeeded by a more invigorating rustic reality. Hesse's characters become more human and less shadowy; inertia and desperation yield to movement and humor. His prose now achieves a more narrative style, and his language becomes more forceful, clearer, and crisper.

Of this first period from 1895 to 1916, the most representative poetic form is a three-quatrain poem, folksong-like in the simplicity and in the lyrical quality of its expression…. Imagery is as unsophisticated as form, syntax, and vocabulary. In the tradition of Romanticism, Hesse uses nature as a mirror for his moods and as a setting for his reflections…. A spirit of fatigue and melancholy pervades the atmosphere, and the prevailing silence is broken only by the murmur of a little stream, the sobs of a child, or the faint thud of falling fruit.

The nature-setting is usually presented in the first, sometimes in the first and second stanzas of a poem. Tersely sketched and faint, these descriptions are much less pictorial than evocative. (pp. 15-16)

Before the second stanza has concluded, Hesse himself appears upon the scene as a weary wanderer, a wistful observer, or a lonely dreamer. (p. 16)

Unfortunately, the transition from description to reflection is often unexpectedly abrupt and the reflection itself is not always of a very poetic nature. Hesse frequently permits himself a too commonplace analogy with a concluding remark that may verge upon banality…. In most of these instances it would have been to greater advantage, poetically, simply to have omitted the last stanza. As it is, there are only a half-dozen or so purely descriptive two-quatrain poems…. These are among the finest of this early period, and the only poems in which Hesse does not immediately allude to himself. (pp. 16-17)

While mood and sentiment had found ready expression in fixed stanzas, metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, intellectual experience and emotional distress were not to be contained by any traditional poetic restraints. The folksong-like poem, which was characteristic of the years preceding 1916, now yields to a restive prose verse, and dramatic situation replaces lyrical description. Accordingly, of the roughly one hundred and twenty-five poems written in the course of the subsequent decade, more than one-third are free verse…. (pp. 22-3)

Stanza division, when retained, is very irregular. Rhyme is continued, although quite without pattern. The syntax becomes more involved, and the vocabulary less evocative, more sober, and eventually quite common…. Background imagery reveals just as decided a change. Nature is no longer a picturesque setting for a brief afterthought, but a casual reference point for more prolonged reflection…. In accord with this shift of emphasis from description and feeling to a more dramatic thought process, allusions to nature are now apt to be metaphorical or symbolical. (p. 23)

The occasional poem written during the second period may recall the background imagery …, the simplicity of expression, and the lyricism of some of Hesse's earlier verse. However, more often than not, there is a definite change in form, as one would expect from his continued emphasis upon reflection. Mood had formerly found expression in three quatrains; thought now usually requires four. Hesse continues to use alternate rhyme but often replaces the iamb with a more emphatic and forceful trochee and shows a slight preference for pentameter rather than tetrameter…. Finally, just as in the free verse of these years, a prose quality detracts from the lyrical nature of the poetry …, and nature is used as a mere reference point or dispensed with entirely…. (p. 27)

A new way of life and a different attitude toward its problems again brought with them corresponding changes in the general nature of Hesse's poetry. Turbulent intellectual-emotional experience had found its most ready expression in dramatic free verse. Quiet contemplation was to find its most characteristic poetic form in reflective-narrative verse. (p. 31)

Nature, although represented in sharper outline and greater detail than before … now appears less frequently. Dispassionate reflection with its more complex syntax, deliberate vocabulary, and halting rhythm, becomes more common…. His poetry then becomes almost transfigured: lofty narrative in studied simplicity …, or a play of symbols in a slow impelling sweep of sound and suggestion…. (pp. 31-2)

[The] once melancholy wanderer, to whom nature had been little more than a mirror for mood, is now an impassive observer, has himself become but a mirror …, and vague landscapes and silhouettes gradually give way to the more detailed descriptions of particular moments and situations…. Just as detached observation reaches a climax in dispassionate, purely descriptive, lyrical poetry, so does Hesse's detached review of life's basic problems culminate in dispassionate, purely reflective lyrical poetry …, and as his thoughts again rise to visions, only symbol remains to give them expression…. (p. 32)

One of Hesse's greatest consistencies was the life-long, immediate correspondence between his personal and his artistic development. (p. 33)