Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), Germany's most famous writer, was one of the great initiators of German Romanticism but later, paradoxically, a committed classicist. T J
Reed, Professor of German at the University of Oxford, celebrates the Romantic Goethe whose profound feeling for individuality spread beyond the poetic self and finally found space for itself in the ordered world of classicism and science.
With excerpts from
Goethe's early poetry, his novel of love and suicide
The Sufferings of Young Werther , his history plays, the tragic love scenes of Faust and some of the first classical texts. Readers include Becky Hindley , Neville Jason ,
Jonathan Kydd , Ian Masters , Kristin Milward , Peter Yapp and Michael Maloney.
Producer Judith Bumpus