West-Eastern Divan - In Twelve Books #271716

Goethe's last important body of lyrical poetry, the West-Eastern Divan, is known to very few English readers. Many persons who are familiar with Faust and Iphigenie and the ballads have never opened this collection of verse. Even in Germany the Divan, as a whole, is much less known than it deserves to be. There are excuses to be pleaded for such neglect. The Divan is the product of Goethe's Indian summer of art-life, the rejuvenescence that came to him when he was sixty-five; and Indian summer has not the mighty ravishment of spring. In this the marks of old age are evident in thought and feeling, in style and diction. Few of its poems are quite equal individually to the most enchanting of Goethe's earlier lyrics; some are obscure even to German commentators; some require for their comprehension an acquaintance with Goethe's scientific ideas; the play of sexagenarian love-making in the book of Zuleika may be easily misunderstood.