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Goethe’s Faust: Poetry and Philosophy at the Crossroads Gabriel R. Ricci Elizabethtown College I. Philosophical Poets In lectures from 1910, subsequently published as Three Philo- sophical Poets, George Santayana provisionally placed Goethe among the philosophical poets. He had no reservation including Dante and Lucretius in this class of poets. Their major works situated them both within the reigning philosophical systems of their day: Santayana viewed Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura as the culmination of antique naturalism, and he regarded Dante’s Divine Comedy as the embodiment of medieval supernaturalism. Though Santayana unequivocally placed Goethe’s Faust within the context of Teutonic romanticism, with its idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible and what he called an attitude marked by the “self‑trust of world‑building youth,” still Goethe’s “thoughts upon life were 1 fresh and miscellaneous.” Santayana found only incidental phi‑ Gabriel r. ricci is Associate Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Depart‑ ment of History at Elizabethtown College. 1 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante and Goethe (Gar‑ den City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 128. The section on Goethe in Santayana’s book is entitled “Goethe’s Faust,” thus emphasizing the centrality of a particular work of Goethe’s to the philosophical spirit of poetry. Line numbers from Faust appear in parentheses throughout the text. I have re‑ lied on Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II, edited by Calvin Thomas (Boston: D. C. Heath Co., 1892‑97). In some cases the original German is quoted and the translations are my own. My interpretations have also been i