What is the significance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is perhaps best known for The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the first novel of the Sturm und Drang movement, and for Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832), a play about a man who sells his soul to the Devil that is sometimes considered Germany’s greatest contribution to world literature.
How did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contribute to romanticism?
Goethe rewrote the formal rules of German poetry, helped to initiate literary Romanticism and German classicism, and embodied many of the contending strands in art over the next century. His work was alternatively lushly emotional, rigorously formal, brief and epigrammatic, and epic.
How did Goethe view life?
“Life in its wholeness is expressed as a force not attributable to any individual part of an organism.” This vitalism fit in well with the world view that Goethe had learned from Spinoza, who held that nature is God and God nature. “All finite beings exist within the infinite,” Goethe wrote.
Was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a Romantic?
In the English-speaking world Goethe is often described as a Romantic, but strictly speaking the young Goethe was a pre-Romantic, and the mature Goethe was a man of the Enlightenment.
Was Goethe the smartest person ever?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top five men are well known, the smartest being polymath Johann Goethe with IQ scores of between 210 to 225. The German polymath, who Albert Einstein claimed to be the ‘last man in the world to know everything’ developed one of the earliest theories of evolution.
What inspired Goethe?
The classical art Goethe encountered in Rome inspired a play and a collection of poetry, Roman Elegies (1787). Goethe continued to find inspiration in his surroundings. During the French Revolution, he was ousted from his home after the French army attacked Prussia.