We have assumed that a trained student in our educational system who lacked the direct contact of travel would get his knowledge of other peoples of the world from a study of foreign languages, from history, or the universal languages of music and art.
Poetry transcends any of these studies in its power to create sympathetic understanding because it is personal, direct and intimate. To us as a nation whose life has been drawn from so many old world strains it is doubly necessary that our youth should appreciate these varied and colorful poetic backgrounds.
It has been our aim to make the poetic material of sufficient intrinsic interest and variety to warrant comment and inflection where so much of the poetry has sprung from an environment unfamiliar to the reader.
Goethe's autobiography was published in three parts, 1811-1814, It begins with the author's birth and carries the story of his life down to the year 1775. It may be supplemented with other autobiographical writings like the Italian Journey. Goethe chose the peculiar title of Poetry and Truth because he wished to indicate that, with all the desire in the world to be strictly truthful, he could not guarantee that he was not viewing his youth through a haze of romantic illusion.
At the beginning of his first adult love affair in 1770 when he was a law student at Strassburg and after their parting when he took his degree in the summer of 1771 many of his most delightful lyrics were inspired by her.
Each of us is too inspired by a first love, a mentor, an event changing occurrence or trauma to at least form the basis for poetry on our part. Which leads us to our conclusion.
To The Kind Reader
by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
1800?
No one talks more than a Poet;
Fain he'd have the people know it.
Praise or blame he ever loves;
None in prose confess an error,
Yet we do so, void of terror,
In the Muses' silent groves.
What I err'd in, what corrected,
What I suffer'd, what effected,
To this wreath as flow'rs belong;
For the aged, and the youthful,
And the vicious, and the truthful,
All are fair when viewed in song.
Copyright:1986-2008