Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Goethe certainly goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare’s equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere come near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and, one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind’s choice among its many high and effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being.”[1]
Goethe
- A perfect face amid barbarian faces,
- A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,
- Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,
- Critic with judgment absolute to all time,
- A complete strength when men were maimed and weak,
- German obscured the spirit of a Greek. [2]
“That inner Light of which the mystics speak is not a metaphor, as when Goethe called for more light in his last moments; it presents itself as a very positive illumination actually seen and felt by the inner sense.”[3]
- ↑ Letters on Poetry and Art, p.367
- ↑ Collected Poems, p.16, circa 1890–98
- ↑ Letters on Yoga – I, p.363
See also