Goethe’s major works are available in translations of generally high quality as Collected Works, 12 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), including a large selection from his scientific writings.
Generous selections of Goethe’s poetry have been translated in prose by David Luke in Goethe, The Penguin Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), reissued as a bilingual edition, and in verse by John Whaley in Goethe: Selected Poems (London: Dent, 1998). Whaley has also made a complete bilingual edition of the Divan as Poems of the West and the East (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998). David Luke has provided a parallel text of the Erotic Poems (Oxford World’s Classics, 1988), comprising the uncut Roman Elegies, The Diary, and some shorter pieces.
Translations of Faust are innumerable. Those by David Luke (Oxford World’s Classics, 1987 and 1998) can be particularly recommended. In addition to the versions in the Collected Works (above), Egmont has been translated by Francis Lamport in Five German Tragedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), Tasso by Alan Brownjohn (London: Angel Books, 1985), while a slightly abridged version of Iphigenie by Roy Pascal, originally broadcast in 1954, was published by Angel Books in 2014.
There are translations of Werther by Michael Hulse (Penguin, 1989) and David Constantine (Oxford World’s Classics, 2012); of Elective Affinities by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 1971) and David Constantine (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994). The most recent translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is by Eric Blackall in the Collected Works; a new translation by Jeremy Adler is in preparation.
The Italian Journey was translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (Penguin, 1970). The diary of Goethe’s first few months in Italy, which formed the basis of the later and more sedate narrative, has been translated by T. J. Reed as The Flight to Italy (Oxford World’s Classics, 1999). For Goethe’s art criticism, see Goethe on Art, ed. and tr. John Gage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
This list is confined to studies in English. The best starting-point is John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), which provides not only a biography but also concise and expert introductions to Goethe’s works. More detailed is the magisterial and often absorbing biography by Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire; vol. 2: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790–1803 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 and 2000); a third volume is awaited. Barker Fairley, A Study of Goethe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), is a vivid account of Goethe’s works and his personality. T. J. Reed, Goethe, Past Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) is an introduction on the same scale as the present one but with a somewhat different approach. Excellent introductions to a range of topics are provided in Lesley Sharpe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
A detailed introduction to Werther is Martin Swales, Goethe, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On its impact, see Stuart Atkins, The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949).
On Elective Affinities, see the stimulating chapter in Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 179–232, and some important articles: H. B. Nisbet, ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Explanation and its Limits’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift, 43 (1969), 458–86; Ronald Peacock, ‘The Ethics of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften’, Modern Language Review, 71 (1976), 330–43; Karl Leydecker, ‘The Avoidance of Divorce in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften’, Modern Language Review, 106 (2011), 1054–72. A guide to these and Goethe’s other novels is Eric A. Blackall, Goethe and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976).
For introductions to Goethe’s poetry, see Barker Fairley, Goethe as Revealed in his Poetry (London: Dent, 1932); T. J. Reed (ed.), Goethe, Selected Poems (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1999)—poems in German, but introduction and commentary in English.
On the relations between the mind and the body, see Matthew Bell, Goethe’s Naturalistic Anthropology: Man and Other Plants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), which includes a study of Werther.
For Goethe’s place in scientific thought I have relied particularly on H. B. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1972), and G. A. Wells, Goethe and the Development of Science, 1750–1900 (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1978). More positive accounts of Goethe’s science are given by Astrida Orle Tantillo, The Will to Create: Goethe’s Philosophy of Nature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Daniel Steuer in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion. E. M. Wilkinson, long the doyenne of Goethe studies, interprets Goethe’s literary works in relation to his science in her book written jointly with L. A. Willoughby, Goethe: Poet and Thinker (London: Arnold, 1962). The doctrine of colours is minutely examined by Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
On Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, see especially Michael Beddow, The Fiction of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 2. David Roberts, The Indirections of Desire: Hamlet in Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980), and Michael Minden, The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1, offer psychoanalytic approaches. On its character as the exemplary ‘Bildungsroman’, see James Hardin (ed.), Reflection and Action: Essays in the Bildungsroman (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991). For its place in European literature, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The ‘Bildungsroman’ in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).
The art historian John Gage has performed a great service by translating a generous selection of Goethe’s writings on art, with a short but useful introduction, as Goethe on Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980). W. D. Robson-Scott, The Younger Goethe and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), is fascinating. On Goethe’s conception of world literature and its background, see John Pizer, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Weltliteratur’, Goethe Yearbook, 13 (2005), 165–79, and Ritchie Robertson, ‘Weltliteratur from Voltaire to Goethe’, Comparative Critical Studies, 12 (2015), 163–81.
On Goethe’s Germany, two studies by W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) and Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), remain indispensable. Standard accounts of the Holy Roman Empire as moribund have recently been challenged by Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
The extent of Goethe’s conservatism as an administrator has been revealed in numerous studies by W. Daniel Wilson, based on research in the Weimar archives, and summarized in his essay ‘Goethe and the Political World’ in the Cambridge Companion. He has reconstructed the story of Johanna Höhn’s execution in ‘Goethe, his Duke and Infanticide: New Documents and Reflections on a Controversial Execution’, German Life and Letters, 61 (2008), 7–32. On the ‘daemonic’ and its intellectual sources, see Angus Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006). Among many essays on Goethe as political dramatist, see especially F. J. Lamport, ‘ “Entfernten Weltgetöses Widerhall”: Politics in Goethe’s Plays’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 44 (1973–4), 41–62, and W. Daniel Wilson, ‘Hunger/Artist: Goethe’s Revolutionary Agitators in Götz, Satyros, Egmont and Der Bürgergeneral’, Monatshefte, 86 (1994), 80–94.
My approach to tragedy in general follows Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), and some passages in C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Erich Heller’s essay ‘Goethe and the Avoidance of Tragedy’ in his The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1952), 29–49, remains useful to argue with. A different account of the late Goethe’s understanding of tragedy is offered by Nicholas Boyle, ‘Goethe’s Theory of Tragedy’, Modern Language Review, 105 (2010), 1072–86.
Commentary on Faust is huge. Useful guides include: John R. Williams, Goethe’s ‘Faust’ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: ‘Faust I’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Barker Fairley, Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Six Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); and Paul Bishop (ed.), A Companion to Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Parts I and II (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001). Eudo C. Mason, Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Its Genesis and Purport (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), is a deeply searching study which attends especially to Goethe’s conceptions of good and evil. An imaginative, wide-ranging study, informed but not dominated by psychoanalysis, is James Simpson, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire (Oxford: Legenda, 1998). On Faust and its afterlife (rewritings, films, rock musicals), see Osman Durrani, Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (Robertsbridge: Helm Information, 2004). Challenging new readings of Faust and Tasso are offered in K. F. Hilliard, Freethinkers, Libertines and ‘Schwärmer’: Heterodoxy in German Literature (London: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, 2011).
For Goethe’s principles of religious toleration, see the wide-ranging study by Paul E. Kerry, Enlightenment Thought in the Writings of Goethe: A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001). On Goethe’s contribution to the Enlightenment more generally, see T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). I have drawn especially on Eudo C. Mason, ‘Goethe’s Sense of Evil’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 34 (1964), 1–53. In interpreting Goethe’s self-definition in his letter to Lavater, I follow T. J. Reed, ‘Goethe as Secular Icon’, in John Walker (ed.), The Present Word. Culture, Society and the Site of Literature: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle (London: Legenda, 2013), 44–51. On Goethe and Kant, I am indebted to Nicholas Boyle, ‘Kantian and Other Elements in Goethe's “Vermächtniß” ’, Modern Language Review, 73 (1978), 532–49. On Goethe’s affirmation of earthly life, see T. J. Reed, ‘Der behauste Mensch: On being at Home in the Universe. Goethe, Kant, and Others’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 83 (2014), 137–48.