Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Palmer, Philip M., and Robert More. Sources of the Faust Tradition. New York: Haskell House, 1965.

Pascal, Roy. “Faust,” Essays on Goethe, ed. W. Rose. London: Cassell, 1949.

Salm, Peter. The Poem as Plant: A Biological View of Goethe’s Faust. New York: University Press Books, 1971.

Wilkinson, E. M., and L. A. Willoughby. “Faust, a Morphological Approach,” Goethe, Poet and Thinker. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962, pp. 95–117.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Before he was thirty, Goethe had proved 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 Young Werther, electrified all Europe. Soon 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 Italy and immersed himself in classical poetry. The next decade saw the appearance of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, his novel of a young artist’s 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-Eastern 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 second 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.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

PETER SALM was born in Hameln, Germany, and received his early education in Rome. After emigrating to the United States in 1938, he studied at UCLA and at Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in comparative literature. He has written on Dante, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, on the interrelations among the arts, and on theories of literature. His books include a study of three major European literary scholars entitled Three Modes of Criticism, also The Poem as Plant, a work that takes account of Goethe’s endeavors in the natural sciences as they inform his poetry, especially his Faust. A recent book by Salm, which deals with the experience of time, is entitled Pinpoint of Eternity: The Quest for Simultaneity in Literature.