In the final poem of Heinrich Heine’s  ‘Lyrical Intermezzo’ (1827) the poet asks for a coffin in which to bury the old songs of German Romanticism that inspired youthful dreams, which in turn occasioned adult disappointment. In an irony typical of Heine, this desire to kill off songs is placed within the wider project of his own Book of Songs. And having called for the death of the Romantic song, twenty years later Heine claims to have written ‘perhaps the last free woodland song of Romanticism’ (vielleicht das letzte / Freie Waldlied der Romantik) in his mock epic Atta Troll (1847). In this panel, papers will address how the writers of Spätromantik overcame the tenacious hold of seemingly worn-out Romantic forms, tropes, and motifs, repurposing them for innovative political, cultural, or aesthetic critique. The folk song; the overdetermined Gothic plot; figures such as the wanderer, the postilion, the beautiful muse; Romantic transcendence itself; are all, by the late 1810s onwards, at risk of becoming mere ciphers for a highly commercialised literary mood. This panel will investigate how and why writers who came belatedly to the Romantic scene, born too late to be among the earliest innovators of the Jena circle, nonetheless found ways of reinventing Romanticism, even if paradoxically through repetition.