Goethe worked on this play for sixty years, from his twenties until just before his death at eighty-two. Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles, but Goethe's version transforms the old legend into a meditation on human striving, on knowledge, on the eternal feminine that draws us upward. The first part is dramatic and accessible; the second part is dense with allegory, pageantry, and classical phantasmagoria. German literature culminates here and begins again. The verse ranges from folk song to philosophical density. Goethe sealed the final manuscript and instructed that it be published only after his death. It was worth the wait.