Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...enormous enigma of Johann Wolfgang Goethe has bewildered and fascinated two centuries of Western culture. In Germany he is worshiped as a demi-divinity; Albert Schweitzer, for instance, modeled much of his life on Goethe's. Yet in the English-speaking world his works are very little read. The Goethe of transatlantic reputation is the plaster Zeus of Weimar who thundered at secretaries and toadied to princes ("Blessed are those who draw near to the great of this world!"). Of his works, only Faust is famous, largely because Charles Gounod made grand opera of it, and only...
...Poetess Louise Bogan collaborated with Elizabeth Mayer on a readable resetting of Elective Affinities. Poet Louis MacNeice, before his death, released a version of Faust that is uniformly the finest in the language. And Poets Robert Lowell, Stephen Spender and Randall Jarrell are all hard at work on English versions of Goethe's verse...
...Warts. What has been badly needed to give form and focus to the Goethe revival is an important new biography, and Critic Richard Friedenthal has now provided it. In his Goethe (World; $8.50), a best seller in German and the first major book about Goethe to be published in English in nearly 20 years, he takes a hard cold look at the legendary giant of German literature, and he sees, along with a startling collection of warts, a man of universal genius...
...evident early, and so were his problems. His mother, a gay young heiress with a wild gene of genius in her own disposition, strongly overstimulated the boy, and his father, a sober Frankfurt lawyer, gave little shape to his education. At seven, Goethe was proficient in six languages: German, English, French, Italian, Greek, Latin. At 16 he had a serious nervous breakdown. In desperation he began to write -"to say what I suffer." Saved by art, he romantically vowed "to convert my entire life into a work...
...course of this minor, deft, deliciously droll and sometimes startlingly profound little novel by P. H. Newby (The Barbary Light, Revolution and Roses), the most ingenious and beguiling Puck to appear on the scene since Henry Green came popping out of the all-too-hollow log of contemporary English literature...