IN THIS COUNTRY FULL OF CONFUSION
sometimes you appear like a blessing
in this country full of confusion
you still show yourself, test yourself
though the misgivings have forgotten you
sometimes I don't expect you, either
absorbed, I catch sight of you like of a wonder
I catch sight of you like of a story
about what it might have been
and will never be
late at night I draw near
the white page
and I write to you, panting, breathing hard, with shyness
I jerkily write to you in haste, with the fear
that I shall change my mind
the next second
I write short halting lines to you
I write to you like this, with a slight hope
which is much stronger than me
Goethe in his Frankfurt Study -- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote epic and lyric poetry in a variety of meters and styles, prose and verse dramas, memoirs and an autobiography, literary and aesthetic criticism, four novels, treatises on botany, anatomy, and color; many literary and scientific fragments, and more than 10,000 letters, and he made almost 3,000 drawings. He was born in Frankfurt, an Imperial Free City of the Holy Roman Empire. His first great passion was drawing, but he also became interested in literature at an early age. From 1765 to 1768 he studied law at Leipzig University, but returned to Frankfurt without a degree; preferring to read, write, and fall in love, but he threw away nearly all of his writing there except the comedy "Die Mitschuldigen." His year and a half at home was marked by severe illness, and in 1770 he left to finish his studies at the University of Strasbourg. That year he anonymously released "Annette," his first collection of poems, mostly written in Leipzig. He also met Johann Gottfried Herder, who kindled his interest in William Shakespeare and Volkspoesie (folk poetry). He also fell in love again and gained a new muse for 10 months. After obtaining the academic degree of the Lizenziat (Licentia docendi) in Frankfurt, he practiced law for a few months and then resumed his writing career; unable to make a living by editing a literary periodical he returned to the law in 1772. In 1774 he wrote "The Sorrows of Young Werther," which brought him international fame before he was 25 but little money. He moved to Weimar in 1775, became a member of the privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in Ilmenau, implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena, and helped plan the city's botanical park and the rebuilding of its ducal palace, he was ennobled by duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar in 1782, thus adding "von" to his surname. In 1791, he bcame managing director of the theatre and in 1794 began a close friendship with Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period he published his second novel, "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," the verse epic "Hermann and Dorothea," and, in 1808, the first part of "Faust."
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