Product Description

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

One of the towering figures of world literature, Goethe has never held quite as prominent a place in the English-speaking world as he deserves. This collection of his four major works, together with a selection of his finest letters and poems, shows that he is not only one of the very greatest European writers: he is also accessible, entertaining, and contemporary.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is a story of self-destructive love that made its author a celebrity overnight at the age of twenty-five. Its exploration of the conflicts between ideas and feelings, between circumstance and desire, continues in his controversial novel probing the institution of marriage, Elective Affinities. The cosmic drama of Faust goes far beyond the realism of the novels in a poetic exploration of good and evil, while Italian Journey, written in the author’s old age, recalls his youth in Italy and the impact of Mediterranean culture on a young northerner.

Translators include W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, David Constantine, Barker Fairley, and Elizabeth Mayer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #403461 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-30
• Released on: 2000-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1248 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375410444
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
“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

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

A useful introduction
I picked up a copy of this book at the local library when I recently become interested in Goethe, and as an introduction to his life and work I found it really useful. The book's Introduction is written by Goethe's biographer (who has currently published two volumes of a planned three volume biography) and it helps establish the context of Goethe's life and legacy. Of all the texts, I found 'The Italian Journey' to be amazing as well as some the selections from Goethe's letters.

I find Goethe to be a fascinating figure and as an excellent writer, he was able to articulate the dynamism and the changing societal forces of the times he lived through - having been born into the era of wigs and knee breeches, he died in the 1830s wearing pants in a Europe revolutionized by Napoleon. Anyone seeking to understand the differences between the 18th Century and the 19th, or even the 20th and the 21st Centuries could gain some valuable insight from reading Goethe's works.

Beautiful book
If you like Von Goethe's work, but you aren't making him your life's study, this is pretty much all inclusive, and looks beautiful.

great volume
I found the reader who didn't like the editing to be well reasoned, but I found the volume as a whole great. I would have liked more letters. The poems are great, and then you have Italian Journey, perhaps Goethe's most underrated book but Thoreau's favorite, which is how I got into Goethe in the first place, along with Werther and a novella and elective affinities. It's a pretty looking volume, too (I know I know). As far as the introduction, I agree it's a bit too blah blah we love Goethe. I read a book by a guy named Strich the other day called Goethe and World Literature, written just after WW2, with great praise for Goethe and a sense of relevance as a potential unifier of Europe.

As far as Goethe's writings, I honestly don't get the whole big thing about Werther. A bitchy boy in love kills himself oh woe. Italian Journey is amazing. It's nice to get a little stoned and read that book for hours.