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. “God” is there, but immanent in the world rather than transcendent, or, to put it in the terms he uses in “Prooemion,” a God who acts from inside Nature rather than from outside.

“One and All” praises the surrender of the separate, suffering self to be dissolved into infinity in a way reminiscent of Buddhism, yet “Legacy” praises the persistence of identity through time ( “No being can melt into nothingness”). “Orphic Words” gives voice to several views of the human condition, including contradictory-sounding ones like astrological predestination ( “Our freedom is deceptive”), social constructionism ( “Your self is formed by your society”), and hope ( “It gives us wings”).

Finally comes peace as reconciliation: “All strife and struggle have become / Eternal peace in God the Lord.” The mystical ending of Faust II reveals a vision of how “Almighty Love” creates and sustains all things. Goethe’s “divine humanism,” at times reminiscent of that of William Blake, is expressed in his reflection on the astronomer Kepler’s sense of “the most exact fusion between the divine in himself and the divine in the universe.” This could well describe Goethe’s own sense of the highest human potential.

Nature and Art

Some of Goethe’s early lyrics are pure love-songs to Nature, seemingly effortless effusions of joy. But this is balanced by a more sober appreciation of her destructive as well as her benign aspects. Stillness may be the prelude to a storm. Voyages may be “fortunate” (a favourite word of Goethe’s), or may end up on the rocks if the sailors are careless or over-confident.

Nature and art are often seen as opposites, but as Goethe puts it in his sonnet “Nature and Art,” they often “meet unexpectedly.” Nature inspires and re-inspires the artist; the second mode here is important for Goethe, who knows that the initial impetus may need one or many renewals. Similarly, the artist’s task is to renew creation, “to re-create created forms.” Goethe celebrates Imagination as “My Goddess,” who bridges the gaps between God, Nature and humanity, and whom he evokes as Jove’s favourite daughter and our “faithful spouse.”

Goethe believed both that Nature is creative and that creativity is natural. But his poems about the vicissitudes of the artistic life show that it is not always easy: he is hard on dilettantism. Only with discipline and perseverance is the artist rewarded with completion.