While Goethe loved Homeric epic, at the same time, the figure of Homer himself was a source of deep literary anxiety for him. Goethe could translate epic, even masterfully, but he shrunk back from attempting to compose a serious full-length epic of his own. “Who could vie with the great nonpareil?” he wrote.

Reading Wolf’s Prolegomena was a significant turning point for Goethe. So greatly had he revered his Homer, that at first, he angrily rejected the idea of an Iliad and Odyssey composed by a succession of illiterate rhapsodes. Gradually, however, with the help of...