Volume XI, Issue II, Spring 2018

THE AGONIST
through to his final writings, I believe that Nietzsche actually sustains a
distinction between two poetic types, and it is always as the second type that he
writes when he poetizes, though he is even in an agon with poetry when writing
prose. “It is noteworthy,” Nietzsche professes, “that the great masters of prose
have almost always been poets, too—if not publicly then at least secretly, in the
‘closet.’ Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an
uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry: all of its attractions depend on
the way in which poetry is continually avoided and contradicted” (GS §92). 6 If
this reveals how, even in avoiding it, prose can be deeply informed by poetry
and that one may remain a poet even when not writing verse, let us proceed to
the two poetic types as conceived by Nietzsche to elucidate his intensified
Platonic polemic, and to clarify why, in fact, there is no irresolvable disparity.
The first type, which is generally if not always the subject of Nietzsche’s
critique whenever he speaks of the poet and of poets, is a nihilist who uses
language to lie and enchant. In promulgating universal ideals, this type maintains
views that are false, untenable, and possibly dangerous, for the universal
homogenizes what is particular, distinct, and resolutely singular. Such
humanistic ideals are essentialist and elide social, cultural, and epochal
differences in claiming to represent what is fundamentally human and particular
to all, whereas Nietzsche complicates the “human,” which to him is an
undetermined animal whose status is ambiguous. This type of poet is first
characterized in Human, All Too Human as one whom either escapes from the
sufferings of its present age, or evades them through “coloring” them with past
insights instead of developing insights particular to its own epoch. 7 In this way,
positions from various perspectives and giving weight to alternative views, which is
emblematic of his very conception of philosophy. The following passage from Schlegel
is relevant, too: “Humanity has correctly sensed that it is its eternal, necessary character
to unify in itself the indissoluble contradictions, the incomprehensible enigma that
emerges out of the joining together of what is eternally opposed.” See Friedrich
Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), 25.
6 Mexican poet Octavio Paz made a similar observation when stating that “Language,
by its own inclination, tends to be rhythm. As if they were obeying a mysterious law of
gravity, words return to poetry spontaneously. At the heart of all prose, more or less
attenuated by the demands of discourse, circulates the invisible rhythmic current.” See
Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), 56–57. This passage
is in the chapter “Verse and Prose.”
7 In BT, Nietzsche speaks of the epic and the lyric poet and Socrates as emblematic of
the anti-poetic (strictly logical) stance Nietzsche opposes in philosophy and life, but
those types are particular to ancient Greek poetry and different from the ones here in
question.
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