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Though ostensibly in practice as a lawyer, the young poet (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) now found himself caught up in a whirl of literary and social duties—helping to edit the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen (“Frankfurt Scholarly Reviews”), for instance—and it was to break loose from this that he left for Wetzlar, seat of the supreme court of the Empire. But again literature won the day over law, and an impassioned yet self-ironic ode in free verse, “Wandrers Sturmlied” (“Wanderer's Storm Song”), is testimony both to a recently inspired admiration for Pindar, the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece, and to a hesitant certainty that he himself might be destined for greatness. And in Wetzlar he experienced a new passion, this time for a girl safely out of reach from the start, Charlotte Buff. Her betrothed, Johann Christian Kestner, showed great understanding until, as it seemed to him, he found the affair exposed to public gaze in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther; 1774). But much besides the Wetzlar experience had gone into the making of this novel: Herder's scathing comments on his young pupil's lack of formal- and self-mastery; the recent indictment by G.E. Lessing of the Neoplatonic doctrine of artistic creation in Emilia Galotti; a passing attraction to Maximiliane, the daughter of the German novelist Sophie von La Roche, who probably endowed his heroine with her black eyes. And it was only when Kestner reported the suicide of a Wetzlar acquaintance who had killed himself out of hopeless love that all this was precipitated into a plot. If Werther took the world by storm it was because, in Thomas Carlyle's words, it gave expression to “the nameless unrest and longing discontent which was then agitating every bosom.” But this first novel is no sentimental tearjerker. Nor is disappointed love its real theme. It is rather what the 18th century called Enthusiasm: the fatal effects of a predilection for absolutes, whether in love, art, society, or the realm of thought. The mind that conceived its symmetry, wove its intricate linguistic patterns, and handled the subtle differentiation of hero and narrator was moved by a formal as well as a personal passion. Even the title has been trivialized in translation: Sorrows (instead of “Sufferings”) obscures the allusion to the Passion of Christ and individualizes what Goethe himself thought of as a “general confession,” in a tradition going back to St. Augustine. --Encyclopedia Britannica