The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (17 page)

In 1775, after an invitation to visit the court of the young new duke of Weimar, Goethe arrived at Weimar, where he accepted an appointment to the ducal court; he would remain there, on the whole, for the rest of his life. His presence helped to establish Weimar as a literary and intellectual centre. But Goethe was never entirely at ease in his role of Weimar courtier and official, and his literary output suffered. Until 1780, he continued to produce original and substantial works—particularly, in 1779, a prose drama,
Iphigenie auf Tauris
(
Iphigenia in Tauris
). Thereafter, however, he found it increasingly difficult to complete anything, and the flow of poetry, which had been getting thinner, all but dried up. He kept himself going as a writer by forcing himself to write one book of a novel,
Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung
(
The Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister
), each year until 1785. In a rough-and-tumble, ironic way, reminiscent of the English novelist Henry Fielding, the novel tells the story of a gifted young man who aims for stardom in a reformed German national theatrical culture. At first the plot was transparently autobiographical, but Goethe's own development gradually diverged from that of his hero, and the novel remained in manuscript during his lifetime. For 10 years Goethe turned away completely
from publishing; the last lengthy work of his to be printed before the silence was
Stella
in 1776.

Goethe spent most of the years from 1786 to 1788 in Italy, away from the court and its pressures and disappointments. As a geologist, he climbed Vesuvius; as a connoisseur of ancient art, he visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. He consulted others about his own drawing and joined the circle of the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, and the actress who was later to be, as Emma, Lady Hamilton, the ambassador's wife and Lord Nelson's mistress. In Sicily he had reached a landscape impregnated with a Greek past, in which Homer's
Odyssey
seemed not fanciful but realistic; later he even toyed with the idea that Homer might have been a Sicilian. What Goethe came to value most about this time was not the opportunity of seeing ancient and Renaissance works of art and architecture firsthand but rather the opportunity of living as nearly as possible what he thought of as the ancient way of life, experiencing the benign climate and fertile setting in which human beings and nature were in harmony. His return to Weimar in June 1788 was extremely reluctant.

By his 40th birthday, in 1789, Goethe had all but completed the collected edition of his works, but he seems not to have known where to go next as a poet. A drama failed; he tinkered with satires and translations. Perhaps by way of compensation, he turned to science. In 1790 he published his theory of the principles of botany,
Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären
(“Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants”; Eng. trans. in
Goethe's Botany
), an attempt to show that all plant forms
are determined by a process of alternating expansion and contraction of a basic unit, the leaf. In 1791, however, a completely new scientific issue began to obsess him: the theory of colour. Convinced that Newton was wrong to assume that white light could be broken into light of different colours, Goethe proposed a new approach of his own.

In 1794 the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller suggested that he and Goethe should collaborate on a new journal,
Die Horen
(
The Horae
), intended to give literature a voice in an age increasingly dominated by politics. The friendship with Schiller began a new period in Goethe's life, in some ways one of the happiest and, from a literary point of view, one of the most productive. In
The Horae
he published a collection of short stories,
Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten
(“Conversations of German Émigrés”; Eng. trans.
The German Refugees
), which were found tedious, and the
Roman Elegies
, which were found scandalous, and serialized a translation of the autobiography of Florentine Mannerist artist Benvenuto Cellini, which was acceptable but unexciting.

Schiller soon lost interest in the journal, which ceased publication after three years. Perhaps it had served its purpose simply by initiating the collaboration with Goethe, which was closer, longer, and on a higher level than any comparable friendship in world literature. The poets began a correspondence, which ran to over a thousand letters, and for over 10 years they discussed each other's works and projects, as well as those of their contemporaries, in conversation and writing. Both profited incalculably from the relationship. But in early 1805 Schiller and Goethe both fell seriously ill. Schiller died. Goethe recovered but felt that, with Schiller dead, he had lost “the half of my existence.”

In 1806 Napoleon routed the Prussian armies at the Battle of Jena. Weimar, 12 miles from the battle, was subsequently occupied and sacked, though Goethe's house was spared, thanks to Napoleon's admiration for the author of
Werther
. In 1808 he met Napoleon during the Congress of Erfurt and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He became reconciled to Napoleon's rule, regarding it as a more or less legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Empire, and, in the relatively peaceful interval after the Austrian war against France in 1809, a new serenity entered his writing. But that ended during the years 1814–17, after the overthrow of Napoleon's dominion by allied troops at the Battle of Leipzig (1813). Alienation from the modern age is the undertone in all his work of this period.

In his final years he experienced a time of extraordinary, indeed probably unparalleled literary achievement by a man of advanced age. He prepared a final collected edition of his works, initially in 40 volumes, the
Ausgabe letzter Hand
(“Edition of the Last Hand”). He wrote a fourth section of his autobiography, completing the story of his life up to his departure for Weimar in 1775; he compiled an account of his time in Rome in 1787–88,
Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt
(1829; “Second Sojourn in Rome”); and above all he wrote part two of
Faust
, of which only a few passages had been drafted in 1800.

Work on
Faust
accompanied Goethe throughout his adult life. Of a possible plan in 1769 to dramatize the story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for earthly fulfillment, perhaps including his ultimate redemption, no firm evidence survives. The first published version,
Faust: ein Fragment
, appeared in 1790, with
Faust: Part One
following in 1808 and
Faust: Part Two
in 1832.
Part Two
is, in a sense, a poetic reckoning with Goethe's own times, with their irresistible dynamism and their alienation from his Classical ideal of fulfilled humanity. As with much of Goethe's later work, its richness, complexity, and literary daring began to be appreciated only in the 20th century.

The year 1829 brought celebrations throughout Germany of Goethe's 80th birthday. In the spring of 1832, having caught a cold, he died of a heart attack.

(b. Jan. 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scot.—d. July 21, 1796, Dumfries, Dumfriesshire)

R
obert Burns, considered the national poet of Scotland, wrote lyrics and songs in the Scottish dialect of English. He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality.

Watching his father die a worn-out and bankrupt man in 1784 helped to make Burns both a rebel against the social order of his day and a bitter satirist of all forms of religious and political thought that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity. He received some formal schooling from a teacher as well as sporadically from other sources. He acquired a superficial reading knowledge of French and a bare smattering of Latin, and he read most of the important 18th-century English writers as well as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. His knowledge of Scottish literature was confined in his childhood to orally transmitted folk songs and folk tales together with a modernization of the late 15th-century poem
Wallace
.

Proud, restless, and full of a nameless ambition, the young Burns did his share of hard work on his family's
farm. He developed rapidly throughout 1784 and 1785 as an “occasional” poet who more and more turned to verse to express his emotions of love, friendship, or amusement or his ironical contemplation of the social scene. But these were not spontaneous effusions by an almost-illiterate peasant. Burns was a conscious craftsman; his entries in the commonplace book that he had begun in 1783 reveal that from the beginning he was interested in the technical problems of versification. Though he wrote poetry for his own amusement and that of his friends, Burns remained dissatisfied. In the midst of personal and economic troubles he published
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
in 1786. Its success with simple country folk and sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike was immediate and overwhelming. It included a handful of first-rate Scots poems:
The Twa Dogs
,
Scotch Drink
,
The Holy Fair
,
An Address to the Deil
,
The Death and Dying Words of Poor Maillie
,
To a Mouse
,
To a Louse
, and some others, including a number of verse letters addressed to various friends. In addition, there were six gloomy and histrionic poems in English, four songs, of which only one, “It Was Upon a Lammas Night,” showed promise of his future greatness as a song writer.

Burns moved to Edinburgh in 1786 and was lionized, patronized, and showered with well-meant but dangerous advice. After a number of amorous and other adventures there and several trips to other parts of Scotland, he settled in the summer of 1788 at a farm in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire. At Edinburgh, too, he arranged for a new and enlarged edition (1787) of his
Poems
, but little of significance was added.

In Edinburgh Burns had met James Johnson, a keen collector of Scottish songs who was bringing out a series of volumes of songs with the music and who enlisted
Burns's help in finding, editing, improving, and rewriting items. Burns was enthusiastic and soon became virtual editor of Johnson's
The Scots Musical Museum
. Later, he became involved with a similar project for George Thomson, but Thomson was a more consciously genteel person than Johnson, and Burns had to fight with him to prevent him from “refining” words and music and so ruining their character. Johnson's
The Scots Musical Museum
(1787–1803) and the first five volumes of Thomson's
A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice
(1793–1818) contain the bulk of Burns's songs. Burns spent the latter part of his life in assiduously collecting and writing songs to provide words for traditional Scottish airs. He obtained a post in the excise service in 1789 and moved to Dumfries in 1791, where he lived until his death. He wrote numerous “occasional” poems and did an immense amount of work for the two song collections, in addition to carrying out his duties as exciseman.

It is by his songs that Burns is best known, and it is his songs that have carried his reputation around the world. Burns is without doubt the greatest songwriter Great Britain has produced. He wrote all his songs to known tunes, sometimes writing several sets of words to the same air in an endeavour to find the most apt poem for a given melody. Many songs which, it is clear from a variety of evidence, must have been substantially written by Burns he never claimed as his. He never claimed “Auld Lang Syne,” for example, which he described simply as an old fragment he had discovered, but the song we have is almost certainly his, though the chorus and probably the first stanza are old. (Burns wrote it for a simple and moving old air that is
not
the tune to which it is now sung, as Thomson set it to another tune.) The full extent of Burns's work on Scottish song will probably never be known.

(b. April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, Eng.—d. April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland)

W
illiam Wordsworth was an English poet whose
Lyrical Ballads
(1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.

Wordsworth, orphaned at age 13, entered St. John's College, Cambridge in 1787. Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through the university. The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France. There he was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille and became an ardent republican sympathizer.