Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is mainly known to the English-speaking world as the author of the poetic drama Faust. In Europe – as poet, dramatist, novelist, art critic, literary theoretician, travel writer, author of a treatise on light and colour, and prolific correspondent – he is regarded as the supreme Romantic literary figure. This selection is a classic introduction to one of the giants of European literature. It collects all the beautifully crafted versions Michael Hamburger has made over many years from all periods of Goethe’s creative life, adding more than twenty new poems to Poems and Epigrams (1983), and including a complete version of Goethe’s erotic masterpiece, the Roman Elegies. The critical introduction provides a valuable account of a writer who was, in the words of his translator, ‘so many-sided as to constitute a whole literature’.