Editing The Sorrows of Young Werther (section)

==Effect on Goethe==
[[File:Schmoll Goethe Va.jpg|thumbnail|left|upright|Goethe portrait in profile]]
''Werther'' was one of Goethe's few works aligned with the aesthetic, social and philosophical ideals that pervaded the German proto-[[Romanticism|Romantic]] movement known as ''[[Sturm und Drang]]'', before he and [[Friedrich von Schiller]] moved into [[Weimar Classicism]]. The novel was published anonymously, and Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years,<ref name=Appelbaum/> regretting the fame it had brought him and the consequent attention to his own youthful love of [[Charlotte Buff]], then already engaged to [[Johann Christian Kestner]]. Although he wrote ''Werther'' at the age of 24, it was all for which some of his visitors in his old age knew him. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing the [[Romanticism|Romantic]] movement as "everything that is sick."<ref>Hunt, Lynn. ''The Makings of the West: Peoples and Cultures''. Bedford/St. Martins Press</ref>

[[File:WertherLotte.jpg|thumb|228x228px|Colored engraving of Werther and Lotte.]]

Goethe described the powerful impact the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by his [[vengeful ghost]]. Yet, Goethe substantially reworked the book for the 1787 edition<ref name=Appelbaum/> and acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence that ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' could exert on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. He later commented to his secretary [[Johann Peter Eckermann]] on January 2, 1824 (as it was recorded by Eckermann and published in his book, ''[[Gespräche mit Goethe]]''):<ref>{{cite web |last1=Eckermann |first1=Johann Peter |title=CONVERSATIONS OF GOETHE |url=https://www.hxa.name/books/ecog/Eckermann-ConversationsOfGoethe-1824.html |access-date=12 July 2024}}</ref>

{{Blockquote
|text="(Sup.) Fri., Jan. 2.<br>(...)<br>The conversation now turned on “Werther.” “That,” said Goethe, “is a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. It contains so much from the innermost recesses of my breast—so much feeling and thought, that it might easily be spread into a novel of ten such volumes. [...]<br>(...)<br>“On considering more closely the much-talked-of ‘Werther’ period, we discover that it does not belong to the course of universal culture, but to the career of life in every individual, who, with an innate free natural instinct, must accommodate himself to the narrow limits of an antiquated world. Obstructed fortune, restrained activity, unfulfilled wishes, are not the calamities of any particular time, but those of every individual man; and it would be bad, indeed, if every one had not, once in his life, known a time when ‘Werther’ seemed as if it had been written for him alone.”"
}}