Faust
A scholar who has mastered every discipline and found them all hollow makes a wager with the Devil: endless striving against a single moment of satisfaction. Goethe worked on it for sixty years, from young man to deathbed, and poured everything he knew into it. The founding document of modern restlessness, and the reason we call certain bargains Faustian.
It is a verse drama in a hundred moods, and half of them resist the stage and the armchair alike. The Gretchen tragedy lands; the philosophical machinery around it creaks, and Part Two wanders through allegory that scholars annotate and readers skip. In translation the poetry becomes rhymed effort. Marlowe told the same bargain in a quarter of the pages, and his Devil is better company.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
