Johann Wolfgang Goethe Biography

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

(Frankfurt, 1749-Weimar, id., 1832) German writer.Born into a bourgeois patrician family, his father personally took care of his education.In 1765 he began studying law in Leipzig, although an illness forced him to return to Frankfurt.After recovering his health, he moved to Strasbourg to continue his studies.

Goethe

This was a decisive period, since in him a radical change in his poetic orientation took place.He frequented the literary and artistic circles of the Sturm und Drang , the germ of the first Romanticism, and met the writer and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who invited him to discover Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian and popular poetry.

As a result of these influences, Goethe definitively abandoned the rococo style of his beginnings and wrote several works that began a new poetics, among them Sesenheim Songs , lyrical poems of simple tone and spontaneous, and On German Architecture (1773), a prose hymn dedicated to the architect of the Strasbourg Cathedral, and which inaugurates the cult of genius.

In 1786 he left Weimar and the court to realize his youthful dream, to travel to Italy, the country where he could best explore his fascination with the classical world.Back in Weimar, after spending two years in Rome, he followed the Duke in the Prussian battles against France, an experience he gathered in the French Campaign (1822).Shortly after, in 1794, he established a fruitful friendship with Schiller, with years of rich collaboration between the two.His obligations to the duke ceased (he was only in charge of the direction of the Weimar theater), and he devoted himself almost entirely to literature and the writing of scientific works.

The death of Schiller, in 1805, and a serious illness, made Goethe a character increasingly closed in on himself and attentive only to his work.In 1806 he married Christiane Vulpius, with whom he had already had five children.In 1808 Faust was published and a year later Elective Affinities appeared, a psychological novel about married life that is said to have been inspired by his love for Minna Herzlieb.Moved by his memories, he began his most autobiographical work, Poetry and Truth (1811-1831), to which he dedicated the last years of his life, together with the second part of Faust .

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