Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
Closing the Goethe Gap
By Richard Holmes
Goethe: The Poet and the Age Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790)
by Nicholas Boyle
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 807 pp., $37.50
They tell an Irish joke in my part of North London which the Universal Sage might have liked. An English construction boss is interviewing a Dublin laborer for a building-site job. 'But do you have the knowledge, my lad,' asks the Brit sententiously. 'Can you tell the difference between a joist and a girder?' 'Oh to be sure I have the knowledge, your honour,' replies Patrick, quick as a flash, 'for wasn't it Joist that wrote Ulysses, and Girder who wrote Faust?'
Review, 3602 words
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