The Sorrows Of Young Werther And Selected Writings

For more than two centuries the very title of this book has evoked the sensitivity of youth, the suffering of the artist, the idea of a hero too full of love to live. When the book was first published The Sorrows of Young Werther created a sensation. Banned and condemned but embraced—especially by the young—it has continued to captivate. It is a tragic masterpiece that explores the mind of an artist in alternately joyful and despairing letters recounting an unhappy romance. Goethe addresses issues of love, death, and redemption in an influential portrayal of a character who struggles to reconcile his artistic sensibilities with the demands of the objective world.

A new 2023 translation into modern American English of Goethe's 1809 "Die Wahlverwandtschaften". Elective Affinities is a sweeping romantic novel that explores the idea of human relationships and attraction, using the concept of chemical affinity as a metaphor. "Elective Affinities" is a Newtonian concept describing the attracting of atoms to form molecules. The novel tells the story of two couples, Eduard and Charlotte, and Ottilie and the Captain, whose lives become intertwined in unexpected ways. Goethe uses the novel to explore the nature of love and desire, and how they can be influenced by social conventions and expectations. The novel was controversial at the time for idea of free will in matters of the heart. This edition contains an Afterword by the Translator, a Timeline of Goethe’s Life & Works and a Glossary of Philosophic Terminology used by Goethe.

The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and it also influenced the later Romantic literary movement.

This classic selection of writings by Goethe reflects the author's philosophy of love and death.

"Stanley Corngold's translation is a triumph. This is a glorious achievement, a Werther for the ages."--Christopher Prendergast

Contains a brief biography of Goethe, a collection of some of his best-known works, and a sampling of his personal correspondence. Includes his four major works, together with a selection of his finest letters and poems. The Sorrows of Young Werther is a story of self-destructive love that made its author a celebrity overnight at the age of twenty-five. Its exploration of the conflicts between ideas and feelings, between circumstance and desire, continues in his controversial novel probing the institution of marriage, Elective Affinities. The cosmic drama of Faust goes far beyond the realism of the novels in a poetic exploration of good and evil, while Italian Journey, written in the author's old age, recalls his youth in Italy and the effect of Mediterranean culture on a young northerner. Translators include W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, David Constantine, Barker Fairley, and Elizabeth Mayer.

First published by Wordsworth Editions 1999 and 2007. First published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

'Shall I embrace you, must I let you go? Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast!' Goethe viewed the writing of poetry as essentially autobiographical and the works selected in this volume represent over sixty years in the life of the poet. In early poems such as 'Prometheus' he rails against religion in an almost ecstatic fervour, while 'To the Moon' is an enigmatic meditation on the end of a love affair. The Roman Elegies show Goethe's use of Classical metres in homage to abcient Rome and its poets, and 'The Diary' , supressed for more than a century, is a narrative poem whose eroticism is unusually combined with its morality. Arranged chronologically, David Luke's verse translations are set alonjgside the German orginals to give a picture of Goethe's poetic development. This edition also includes an introduction and notes placing the poems in the context of the poet's life and times.