Goethe: The Poet and the Age

In 1880, Nietzsche observed that Goethe had been 'not just a good and great man, but an entire culture'. The author of Faust, of the bestselling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, of exquisite lyric poetry (set to music by Schubert and Mozart), and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, and poetry as well as treatises on botany and colour theory, Goethe also excelled as an administrator in the cabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar. He was as much a part of German social and political life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as he was the nucleus of its culture.In the first volume of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle covers the period from Goethe's birth in 1749 up to 1790. It is about the great movements from the revolutionary age that he lived in as much as it is about Goethe himself. It traces the personal and poetic meaning that he found in his youth in Frankfurt, his move to Weimar, and his journey to Italy, but it also looks closely at the popular concept of a 'Goethezeit', an Age of Goethe, and shows that the originality of his art lay in his complex distance from the times he lived in. As T. S. Eliot puts it, 'Goethe is about as unrepresentative of his Age as a man of genius can be'. It is this genius that this biography celebrates.