Revolution and Romanticism

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
translated by William Taylor

Iphigenia in Tauris 1793

Goethe’s version of Euripides, shaped outwardly by the Greek ideal but reimagined in interior terms, was first performed at the Weimar court in 1779. It marks the beginning of his classical period and is counted a masterpiece of European literature. In William Taylor’s 1793 translation, moreover, it has a particular place among the early range of English Romantic texts.

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The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.
Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
(Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790)

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Poetry of the 1890s