Byron Shelley And Goethe S Faust

The first part of Goethe's dramatic poem Faust (1808), one of the great works of German literature, grabbed the attention of Byron and Percy Shelley in the 1810s, engaging them in a shared fascination that was to exert an important influence over their writings. In this comparative study, Ben Hewitt explores the links between Faust and Byron's and Shelley's works, connecting Goethe and the two English Romantic poets in terms of their differing, intricately related experiments with epic. In so doing, Hewitt enters the three writers into a literary and philosophical dialogue concerning 'epic' and 'tragic' perspectives on human knowledge and potential - perspectives crucial to the very structure and significance of Goethe's masterpiece - and illuminates hitherto unacknowledged affinities between these key figures in Romantic literature, and between British and German Romanticisms.

The first part of Goethe's dramatic poem Faust (1808), one of the great works of German literature, grabbed the attention of Byron and Percy Shelley in the 1810s, engaging them in a shared fascination that was to exert an important influence over their writings. In this comparative study, Ben Hewitt explores the links between Faust and Byron's and Shelley's works, connecting Goethe and the two English Romantic poets in terms of their differing, intricately related experiments with epic. In so doing, Hewitt enters the three writers into a literary and philosophical dialogue concerning 'epic' and 'tragic' perspectives on human knowledge and potential - perspectives crucial to the very structure and significance of Goethe's masterpiece - and illuminates hitherto unacknowledged affinities between these key figures in Romantic literature, and between British and German Romanticisms.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. This is the final volume of a six-volume edition of The Poems of Shelley, which aims to present all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between late January 1822 and Shelley’s death on 8 July 1822. These include the lyrics to Jane Williams, Fragments of an Unfinished Drama and The Triumph of Life as well as translations from Goethe’s Faust (1822) and Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso. The appendices include editions of Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811), a poem made publicly accessible by the Bodleian Libraries in 2015 for the first time since its publication, and translations by Shelley from Goethe’s Faust (1815), Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1817) and Homer’s Odyssey (probably 1817). In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. Now completed, this is the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.