ABSTRACT
George Gordon Byron's responses seek a way to exist between the two worlds, accepting that a Faustian vision of knowledge contains something true but not definitive about readers. The comparative reading of Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has proved suggestive, but not final. Goethe appreciated the talent required to harness the poetic techniques that made the expression of this attainable, but, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was perturbed by and even hostile to the possible political effects of the poetry in which Byron put those techniques into practice. Shelley exploits still more the radical potential of the epic, implicit in Faust and in Goethe's theories. Goethe also hoped that activity was nevertheless the key to human progress. Reading Byron's and Shelley's works in this fashion shows them in broad agreement with Goethe over this, but also needing to go further, to rework or refute the Faustian, tragic perspective.
