ABSTRACT
In 1899 Otto Pniower assembled in a book materials bearing on the Entstehungsge-schichte of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust and used as an epigraph, which he placed on the title page, a quotation from a letter Goethe had written to his friend K. F. Zeiter, a composer, August 4, 1803: "Works of nature and art one does not get to know when they are finished; one must catch them in their genesis to comprehend them to some extent." Goethe himself had intended his correspondence with Zeiter for publication, and this striking quotation is merely a particularly pithy and, exaggerated formulation of a point implicit not only in his autobiography but in ever so much of his work. In the English-speaking world, both the so-called new criticism and analytical philosophy represent twentieth-century revolts against this developmental approach. Neither of them can be comprehended when this is overlooked.
