Abstract

This dissertation, Nietzsche's Concept of Poetry, examines the relation between poetry as making, and Nietzsche's concept of the will. The groundwork is laid in the first chapter by a study of inspiration in The Birth of Tragedy. The second chapter, entitled "Against Romantic Sentiment" establishes the relation between the truth and lies in poetry. The third chapter focuses on his concept of style and tempo and the way in which Dionysiac inspiration is embodied in concrete visual and acoustic detail. The final chapter studies the content Nietzsche recommends for poetry with a reinterpretation of The Eternal Return in the context of the Redemption of the Earth. ;The theme of poetry as making recurs in contrast to poetry as mere versifying throughout the dissertation. The "proof" of an overfull or superabundant fund of energy can be found embodied in the "tempo" of the signs, which Nietzsche first discovered in the dance--dithyramb--of the Dionysiac revelers in The Birth of Tragedy. In examining Nietzsche's thoughts on poetry after The Birth of Tragedy, however, I found that he drops the specifically tragic impulse as he integrates Dionysiac inspiration into his maturing concept of the will, as a surety or confidence of power which he refers to as the Grand Style. By following this theme, poetry as making, through his study of Greek lyric and tragic poetry , his scathing critique of the poet as liar or actor in the wake of his rejection of Wagnerian Romanticism and through his application of his concept of style to "Four Good Europeans" ; I argue finally that poetry has a central relationship to Nietzsche's understanding of philosophy. ;This, I maintain, is not only found in the fact that Nietzsche's first work is on dramatic poetry, or that he wrote poetry or that he felt his masterpiece to be Thus Spake Zarathustra, which he considered a work of poetry, but in poetry's relation to key discoveries and concepts which are fundamental to any consideration of Nietzsche as a philosopher. In the fourth chapter, "The Redemption of the Earth" I develop the theme found within Thus Spake Zarathustra of a reinvestment of the energy which the earth has offered as the work of the poet in relation to his concept of self-overcoming and his discovery of The Eternal Return. Finally I argue in the Epilogue that the "envisioning" of what is possible in poetry is a necessary "bridge" to what Nietzsche called his philosophy of the future