About the Elegies

Goethe cultivated a special, italianate hand for this portfolio of
twenty-four "elegies," so called because he was emulating the elegiasts of
Imperial Rome, Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus. The Elegies have never before
been published as here, together in the cyclical form of their original
conception. Experts even denied that the two priapeia (I & XXIV) were by
Goethe at all, although they are in the same hand as the rest. To be sure,
these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what
their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at
the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons
her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy
(1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had
taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought of publication when he
indited these remembrances of Ancient Rome. But he did show them to close
friends, one of whom was the wonderful dramatist Friedrich Schiller. In 1795,
Schiller undertook a new periodical, Die Horen. This thoughtful and
responsible man initiated the journal with an essay of his own, explaining
how forms of entertainment are actually at the same time our primary modes
of education. It makes for pretty difficult reading in our present, less
interested epoch. But he did break the essay up with diversions solicited
from the best minds of his era. For a discussion of all this, see

Professor Worthy's Page

For now, it is enough to say that among Schiller's examples for "aesthetic
education," as he called it, were these Elegies by his much admired friend,
Wolfgang Goethe. Editor and author made substantial changes for propriety's
sake--despite Goethe's having lashed out to the contrary in the first Elegy
(which he now suppressed, along with the final one). My attempt has been--for