Before he was thirty, Goethe had proven himself a master of the
novel, the drama, and lyric poetry. But even more impressive than
his versatility was his unwillingness ever to settle into a single
style or approach; whenever he used a literary form, he made of it
something new.
Born in 1749 to a well-to-do family in Frankfurt, he was sent to
Strasbourg to earn a law degree. There, he met the poet-philosopher
Herder, discovered Shakespeare, and began to write poetry. His play
Götz von Berlichingen (1773) made him famous throughout Germany. He
was invited to the court of the duke of Sachsen-Weimar, where he
quickly became a cabinet minister. In 1774 his novel of Romantic
melancholy, The Sorrows of a Young Werther, electrified all of
Europe. Soon as he was at work on the first version of his
Faust, which would finally appear as a fragment in 1790.
In the 1780s Goethe visited England and immersed himself in
classical poetry. The next decade saw the appearance of Wihelm
Meister's Apprenticeship, his novel of a young artist education,
and a wealth of poetry and criticism. He returned to the Faust
material around the turn of the century and completed Part 1 in
1808.
The later years of his life were devoted to a bewildering array of
pursuits: research in botany and in a theory of colors, a novel
(Elective Affinities), the evocative poems of the West-Easters
Divan, and his great autobiography, Poetry and Truth. In his
eighties he prepared a forty-volume edition of his works; the
forty-first volume, published after his death in 1832, was the send
part of Faust.
Goethe's wide-ranging mind could never be confined to one form or
one philosophy. When asked for the theme of his masterwork,
Faust, he could only say. “From heaven through all the world
to hell”; his subject was nothing smaller.
“Goethe’s greatness is singular: it is difficult to think of any
parallel to his achievement . . . At every stage of a long and
inwardly turbulent life he rediscovered, or reinvented, himself
through his writing, and yet he never significantly repeated
himself. For each of the ages of man, which he experienced in his
own person, he found a new poetry.”
—from the Introduction by Nicholas Boyle
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
