The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Novella

Book excerpt: When The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it inspired a mass cult of feelings (and reputedly a few suicides) and made its author one of the first literary celebrities. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's story of a tormented young man whose fixation on an inaccessible woman culminates in tragedy may be read as a celebration of unfettered emotion or as a mercilessly accurate portrait of a man whose dedication to pure feeling turns him into a monster. In this translation, which is recognized as the definitive English-language version, W. H. Auden collaborated with Elizabeth mayer and Louise Bogan to capture all of Werther's soaring romanticism and moral ambiguity. It appears here with Novella, Goethe's idyll of a pastoral kingdom where the reverence for life transcends barriers of class.