Shortly before his death he wrote, in a letter dated 17 March 1832: “My most important task is to go on developing as much as possible whatever is and remains in me, distilling my own particular abilities again and again.” The drama of Faust, which occupied Goethe over a period of sixty years, reflects this spirit in the hero’s lifelong quest for self-development through many experiences, phases and roles. Because Faust is continually developing, his soul will not be forfeit to the devil, in spite of their bargain. Growth is redemption: “Whoever occupies himself with constant striving, he can be redeemed.”

Another key to Goethe is that all these different aspects, activities and phases represent the fulfillment over time of one’s underlying identity. Where traditionally a given human character was seen as essentially set for life, Goethe was among the first to see it as intrinsically developmental, incomplete at any one stage, and only fully unfolded in time. This change of view could be compared to the shift accomplished later by Darwin and others from seeing Nature as fixed order to seeing it as continually evolving. For Goethe the task of self-realization was a lifelong effort to become one’s true self, that is, one’s full self, a process similar to what Carl Jung later called “individuation.”

Full self-development may involve contradictions. Goethe appears to take both sides of most oppositions. It may be necessary to experience both sides of a situation or an issue, or to manifest qualities that seem like opposites. Goethe is both poet and scientist, romantic and classicist, a northerner attracted to the south, a westerner drawn to the east, an innovator and traditionalist, an adherent of both the ancient and the modern, of both the local (Weimar) and the global (world literature). To experience and reconcile these great opposites over a lifetime he sees as the way to human wholeness.

THEMES OF GOETHE’S POETRY

I have employed the idea of paired concepts as the basis for arranging my selection of Goethe’s poems into four broad sections, based not on a single theme but on a major opposition or pairing: Love and Solitude; Gods and Humans; Nature and Art; and Wit and Wisdom. Within each section, except the last, the order is roughly chronological, reflecting the idea of self-development over time, unless there are key thematic links which justify placing poems together, as in the cases of the Mignon and Harpist poems. In the final section, I have followed a thematic sequence from autobiography, through social satire to general reflections on life.

Love and Solitude

Goethe wrote love poems from ages eighteen to eighty. Many are based on personal experiences, from the 1771 “May Song” he devoted to Friederike Brion, the daughter of the parson of a village near Frankfurt, to the 1828 Dornburg poems written for Marianne von Willemer, an actress married to a Frankfurt banker (she was his collaborator on the West-Eastern Divan, in which she and Goethe appear in the fictive guises of Suleika and Hatem). The moods of Goethe’s love poems range from the joys of united lovers, to the sadness and longing of the separated. The forms are equally various, from narrative ballads such as “Mountain Castle,” to sonnets like “Travel Provisions.” There is also a set of three pastorals, lightly satirical poems about the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses. In “The Elf-King” the father’s love for his son fails to save him from supernatural entrapment and death.

Solitude is an important counter-theme to love. Goethe finds a place for the unfortunate in love, as well as the fortunate. Many poems express the sadness and grief of the bereaved lover ( “The King in Thule”) or the betrayed lover ( “The Spinster”). “To the Moon” conveys a mood of disillusion about love, and ends with the consolations of retirement from the world. But the most striking treatment of the solitude theme is perhaps a group of seven poems taken from the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Three concern Mignon, an androgynous young woman who is devoted to Wilhelm, but is suffering from a mysterious trauma in the past, probably in Italy, which she has vowed to conceal. Four are about the Harpist, a lonely wanderer and beggar, who turns out to be Mignon’s father through an incestuous union with his own sister. These two characters embody the pathos of lonely and homeless wandering which counterpoints the sense of community celebrated in “Bonding Song” and the knightly orders or “noble companies” evoked in other poems.

Gods and Humans

In his early twenties Goethe moved away from the Lutheranism in which he had been brought up, and gravitated towards Spinoza’s philosophy of God-in-Nature. At the same time he became interested in other religious traditions, including Greek polytheism and Islamic monotheism. This openness to all religious traditions, unusual in his time, is evident in his poetry throughout the rest of his life, and eventually included the God of Christianity he had begun by rejecting. A prose maxim reflects his general attitude to religion, though he did not consistently adhere to its prescriptions: “Researching into nature we are pantheists, writing poetry we are polytheists, morally we are monotheists.”

There is a wide range of feelings about religion in Goethe. “A Song about Mohammed,” originally set out as dialogue between two devotees, imagines the prophet as a force of nature, a river which gathers tributary streams as it runs through the mountains to the plains. The early poems based on Greek myths contrast Prometheus’ truculent defiance of Zeus with Ganymede’s rapturous love of him. At times Goethe seems to accept the injustice of the gods: “Winter Journey in the Harz Mountains” contrasts the fate which “a god” has ordained for the unfortunate man left by the wayside (based on Goethe’s depressive acquaintance Friedrich Plessing), and the fortunate poet (clearly Goethe himself), whose way through life is protected by love, and whose poetry is inspired by Nature. “Human Limits” advises against trying to rival the gods ( “no human being should measure himself against the gods”) while “The Divine” counters with the need to imitate them ( “a human should be like them”). Some poems urge us to seek immortality, while others advocate an acceptance of transience. “Eternal” is one of his favourite words, which can be applied in paradoxes, such as “The moment is eternal.” Poetically Goethe seems to exult in having it both ways.

In later poems Goethe ends up with a pantheon of “eternal beings” which represents his own synthesis of world religions.