Goethe is not only good at painting, but also has extensive research on natural science. There are lyric poems, blank poems, group poems, long narrative poems, pastoral poems, historical poems, historical dramas, tragedies, poetic dramas, novels, short stories, educational novels, epistolary novels, autobiographical poems, essays and other literary works. The most famous novels are Young Werther (1774), Faust (1774 ~ 183 1) and William masters (1775 ~ 65438+). The Trouble of Raising Teenagers was warmly welcomed by the masses because it reflected the anti-feudal aspirations of a generation of young people, which made Goethe enjoy the voice of the world from now on. Faust is based on the legend of Dr. Faust in Germany in the16th century, and it was processed and transformed. It is an artistic summary that advanced bourgeois people constantly explore and pursue during the rise of European bourgeoisie. Tragedy is not only magnificent in structure and colorful, but also combines realism, romanticism and symbolism, which makes the whole thoughts, words and deeds of Faust and Mephistopheles the devil form a dialectical development relationship between good and evil, action and emotion, and success and failure.

Goethe's brilliant achievements in his life, especially in his later creation, are inseparable from his insistence on this realistic principle. Goethe led the crazy and tenacious sprint in his early years and tended to romanticism. But later, I realized that romanticism was "morbid" and turned to classicism. The classicism advocated by Goethe is essentially realism. Realism is a focus of Goethe's later theoretical thinking. In the historical process of the development of western realistic theory, Goethe's realistic literary thought can be said to be a milestone, which has played a direct and powerful role in promoting the development of European realistic literature. The European critical realism literary movement, which rose in 1930s, was obviously deeply influenced by Goethe's literary thought.

He doesn't attempt to "embody something abstract" in his works, but only processes the "perceptual, vivid, lovely, colorful" and "impressions" obtained from life in an artistic way and provides them to people through "vivid description". Although Goethe did not specify the source of "impression" here, it is not difficult to understand that the so-called "impression" is nothing more than the reflection of the real life of the objective outside world in the writer's subjective consciousness, and it is the writer's "reflection" on the objective life in social practice. Because he thinks this is the real foundation and basis of literary and artistic creation.

When Goethe talked with Aikman about the creation of Faust, on the one hand, he admitted that "there is not a single line without a clear sign of carefully studying the world and life", on the other hand, he said: "If I don't put the world in my heart first with a hunch, I will turn a blind eye ... There are lights and colors around us, but if there are no lights and colors in our eyes, we can't see the light and colors outside". The "premonition" and "light and color" in his eyes refer to the writer's active induction and prediction of the psychological state of life, or a broad, energetic and tense psychological form that the creative subject should have. From this, we can read the meaning that a literary creator's feeling and grasp of specific external things depends on the corresponding subjective conditions. Without these conditions, things that exist objectively, even if they are meaningful, will not become his object, so they cannot trigger his creative impulse.