I once had a conversation with my father about Goethe (not the usual father/son talk I'll grant you) and he said something along the lines of "I'm not much a fan of Goethe, I must admit. He was too much of an establishment figure. I prefer the Voltaires of this world". I couldn't help but think that surely that's what most people believe. Goethe, for me, offers something different; he shows that it is possible to live a proper life, to work 9-5 and then still write poetry and prose that rank amongst the greatest European literary achievements.

"Mozart: no idea about money, pauper's grave; his friends had to take money away from him because he was so irresponsible; Balzac: dressed as a monk, drank 40 cups of coffee a day, economic basket case; Baudelaire: drug addict , compulsive gambler, squandered his inheritance; Wagner: insanely egoistic, borrowed from all his friends, never paid his debts; Tolstoy: wanted to be a penniless serf; Nietzsche: didn't make a penny from his writing, later royalties went to his horrible sister; Proust: didn't know how to open a window or boil a kettle, lost lots of money through extravagance and inept speculation; Wittgenstein: tormented ('If just one person could understand me I would be satisfied'), ate mainly bread and cheese, gave away all his money -- to his rich siblings so as not to corrupt the poor; Jackson Pollock: everyone else made money out of him 'If I'm so famous why ain't I rich?')"

Goethe is an unusual hero, he didn't die young, he led a professional life in the court of Weimar, he was financially solvent and yet these things did not stop his artistic creativity. Goethe offers a vision of balance and hope to anyone frustrated by the toil of daily life as it is not the limit of what you can achieve. ( )

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=7pvx31j8lt0q1vyqlzskphwpwpdc3rkc
Goethe's Bright Circle
By JAY PARINI

excerpt:

Lately I've been surprisingly elevated by a new life of Goethe, that magnificent fellow at the center of German literature if not German consciousness itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) lived what is commonly called a charmed life. He was born into a relatively wealthy and happy family. His father was an influential lawyer with wonderful connections around Frankfurt am Main. His mother was even more well connected, being the daughter of a former mayor of the city. Goethe lived in a beautiful house, was looked after with a keen eye to his development, and received a solid education. As a young man, he had an unhappy fling with a young woman called Charlotte, but he was not one on whom any experience was wasted. He turned that sad affair to account in a short, brilliant novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which introduced to the literary world the ideal of the Romantic hero (whose unrequited love leads him to suicide). Goethe didn't even bother to change Charlotte's name, although he did shorten it to Lotte. The novel entranced readers, who were attracted to its lyricism, its passionate view of life, and its benign vision of the natural world as the dreamy Werther lay in the grass, delighted in the insects, and thought about the manifold variety of creation.

As John Armstrong's Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) recounts, young Goethe became the most famous writer in Europe at the time, with adoring readers everywhere ready to welcome him. One of those was the bright, powerful, eccentric Duke Karl August von Saxe-Weimar, who took on Goethe as friend and adviser. Goethe remained in the intimate Weimar circle for much of his life, straying only for occasional jaunts to places like Italy, where the high life beckoned. (See his Italian Journey, 1786-1788, one of the finest travel books ever written.)