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As much poem as it is play, Goethe's Faust is the spiritual quest of a soul determined to explore the very nature of Reality, a revolutionary work that refuses to accept limitations, but, like Romanticism itself, embraces all, the Natural World of everyday life, as well as the Great World of universal experience, the macrocosm as well as the microcosm. The Faust character, the Faustian soul, has become a universal concern. As multifarious as Hamlet and as mythic as Oedipus, he takes us on a journey to the depths and heights of experience and leaves us not the person we were before we met him. It is in Part One of Goethe's masterpiece that we discover Faust as the hero in whose being two contradictory forces collide. He is self-alienated man struggling to expand beyond the limitations of intellect and the known world, desperate to achieve a state, indeed mystical, where the opposites of Knowledge and Sensuality are One. Part One of Faust records that attempt in the context of earthly existence. Goethe's Faust has rightly been called the most audacious work in Western Civilization. [via]