Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

"The book is not only about Faust , but it places the drama in what I think is the appropriate context. Santayana discusses Faust together with Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Dante’s Divine Comedy . We are invited to compare three great poetic works each of which offers an encompassing philosophical vision. Each gives us a poem that embraces an entire world. In the introduction I wrote for the Princeton translation of Faust , one of the things I say is that the best kind of work to compare it with is an encyclopaedia. Goethe absorbs virtually his entire cultural knowledge into the play. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The poems of Lucretius and Dante have the same universal scope. Santayana’s thought was that, by juxtaposing the three, we can acquire a synoptic understanding of the materialist worldview of classical antiquity, the theological worldview of late medieval Europe, and then, in Goethe’s work, the Romantic conception of life, love, striving, and historical change. Santayana’s study affords us then a profound appreciation of what Goethe meant by world literature. “The best kind of work to compare Faust with is an encyclopaedia. Goethe absorbs virtually his entire cultural knowledge into the play” Santayana’s book was first published in 1910. It’s based on a lecture course that he regularly gave at Harvard University. This book highlights the place of German culture in the American mind at the onset of the 20th century. With the beginning of the First World War in 1914 (which the United States entered in 1917) we can observe an abrupt demise in the perceived importance of the German literary and cultural heritage in the United States. That is only aggravated with the Second World War. But if we look at the history of 19th-century America, if we look at figures like Emerson, who was deeply influenced by Goethe, or his collaborator Margaret Fuller, the brilliant editor of The Dial , we can see that German thought and literature were at the core of Americans’ efforts to shape an indigenous cultural self-awareness. With the great wave of German immigration to the United States after 1848, that cultural inheritance is deepened. Santayana’s beautifully written and deeply thought book, therefore, reminds us of cultural ties that are complexly entwined with American history. One final recommendation. Another path to Goethe runs through music. Regarding Faust alone, we have the operatic dramatizations of Berlioz and Boito and Schumann’s Faust Music , just to mention three prominent examples. My particular recommendation, however, is the conclusion of Mahler’s 8th Symphony. The verses sung are from the Dantesque coda that concludes Act Five. I believe that Mahler’s music and Goethe’s words convey the experience of spiritual transcendence and transfiguration with incomparable immediacy and tenderness. Readers who have begun to master the complexities of Goethe’s drama will find here their own timeless moment."