ABSTRACT
More than any other author, Goethe established distinctly romantic perspectives on Prometheus. His ode replaced the Enlightenment’s benefactor of an Arcadian mankind with a modern rebel who endured unjust persecution in the solitude of creative genius. Goethe achieved this metamorphosis not only by depicting an impenitent revolutionary and autonomous creator, but also by rejecting earlier poetic conventions governing stanzaic structure, line length, syntax, and vocabulary. The ode’s daring subject and formal traits exerted an immediate and lasting influence. For Goethe’s contemporaries it embodied the Sturm und Drang movement,1 while later writers, especially Shelley, Coleridge, Browning, and Bridges, interpreted its indictment of authoritarianism as the source of human suffering in new versions of the legend or critical essays. And three lieder composers-Reichardt, Schubert, and Wolf-matched its thematic and stylistic audacities by violating generic norms and subverting tonal conventions.
