Johann Wolfgang Goethe (*1749 in Frankfurt am Main – ✝1832 in Weimar) was a German writer and statesman. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas as well as numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings.

He can be considered as the most important and influental German writer.

There are frequent references to Goethe’s writings throughout the works of G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung.
Goethe’s poems were set to music throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by a number of composers, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Charles Gounod, Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz and Gustav Mahler.