me, or otherwise occupied my attention, and of coming to
some certain understanding with myself thereupon....
All the works therefore that have been published by me are
only fragments of one great confession.

[Footnote: English translation, edited by Parke Godwin, Vol. I, p.66.]

This effect of artistic expression belongs, of course, to other forms
of expression. Every confession, every confidential outpouring of
emotion, is an example. We have all verified the truth that to formulate
feeling is to be free with reference to it; not that we thereby get
rid of it, but that we are able to look it in the face, and find some
place for it in our world where we can live on good terms with it. The
greatest difficulty in bearing with any disappointment or sorrow comes
not from the thing itself--for after all we have other things to live
for--but from its effect upon the presuppositions, so to speak, of our
entire existence. The mind has an unconscious set of axioms or
postulates which it assumes in the process of living; now anything
that seems to contradict these, as a great calamity does, by destroying
the logic of life, makes existence seem meaningless and corrupts that
faith in life which is the spring of action. In order for the health
of the mind to be restored, the contradictory fact must be somehow
reconciled with the mind's presuppositions, and the rationality of
existence reaffirmed. But an indispensable preliminary to this is that
we should clearly envisage and reflect upon the fact, viewing it in
its larger relations, where it will lose its overwhelming significance.
Now that is what expression, by stabilizing and clarifying experience,
enables us to do.

A great many works of art besides Goethe's, not merely of lyric poetry,