Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume 1: The Poetry of Desire, 1749-1790

Goethe: The Poet and the Age #1

by Nicholas Boyle

The author of Faust, the best-selling 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, poems, and treatises, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also excelled as an administrator in the cabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar.

Considered by Nietzsche to have been `not just a good and great man, but an entire culture', Goethe was as vital a part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German social and political life, as he was its cultural nucleus. However, as this perceptive biography shows, the originality of his art lay in his complex distance from his times.

Genres: Biography, History, Germany, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

844 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Nicholas Boyle is Schröder Professor of German Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and former President of Magdalene College.

Reviews

[Stewart Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book, very detailed. I learned more about Goethe than I ever thought possible. There was not enough written about the time, but rather it focused on his life and immediate circles.

[Rosa Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best Goethe-biography ever written.

[John]

philosophy,biography,nonfiction,enlightenment

[Jack Coleman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic Biography which is hard to read but interesting insites into the age