Goethe

I came into the world in Frankfurt (1749), and at Leipzig and Strasbourg I learned the living strength of language and song. Under Herder's influence I listened to folk tones and antique measure. With Götz and then The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) I spoke a youth’s impatience. Europe echoed it more loudly than I wished; strangers dressed in my hero’s coat, and I, disquieted, sought a stricter form.

In 1775 Duke Carl August called me to Weimar. I wrote at a desk that also bore maps, mining ledgers, and road plans. I descended into the pits at Ilmenau, argued over timber and tariffs, and learned that good order is itself a kind of poetry. After my Italian Journey (1786–88), the statues and sky of Rome taught me proportion; I recast Iphigenie, shaped Egmont and Tasso, and set Wilhelm Meister on his apprenticeship.

Friendship with Schiller, begun in 1794, steadied my hand. Together we tended a theater that should educate without pedantry. I walked the campaign against France with my duke and later met Napoleon at Erfurt; he spoke of Werther with soldierly exactness that amused and sobered me. In Jena I conversed with the restless minds who pressed philosophy toward new systems.

Beside the poems ran another inquiry. In 1784 I described the human intermaxillary bone; in 1790 the metamorphosis of plants; in 1810 my Theory of Colours opposed the reigning optics and set perception at the center. Through all these labors moved Faust, a companion from youth to old age: Part I appeared in 1808; the rest I left to the world when I departed Weimar in 1832.