Platen, in the critical imagination, is a classicistic formalist who hid his anguished life behind imitative art. This cliche - which originates in Heine's early caricature - has not been corrected because of a virtual absence of close analyses of the kind undertaken in this study. There is shown to be unsuspected continuity in experiments with lyric forms as different as Lied, ghasel, sonnet, ode, idyll and Pindaric hymn; Platen appears as a decidedly confessional, even histrionic, writer in the wake of Byron, and his subjectivity proves strong and unrepentant enough to be comparable to Heine's own.