Nietzsche, Yeats and the Limits of Art

Nietzsche, Yeats and the Limits of Art

Erich Heller examines Nietzsche's influence on W. B. Yeats, the religion of art, and the dream of overcoming divided consciousness. From The Birth of Tragedy and Sailing to Byzantium to A Vision, political aestheticism, Meru, Rilke and Hegel, he asks what poetry can accomplish and why it cannot promise salvation. Bard College, 15 March 1966.

1. 0:00 — Yeats encounters Nietzsche; the final postcard
2. 1:43 — The Birth of Tragedy: beauty and suffering
3. 4:42 — Sailing to Byzantium and the artifice of eternity
4. 9:00 — Nietzsche's prophecy and The Second Coming
5. 14:15 — How Yeats read Nietzsche: the annotated anthology
6. 17:32 — Christian morality, Aquinas and Yeats's marginal notes
7. 25:17 — Creative influence, Leda and the mythology of A Vision
8. 31:50 — The political dangers of aesthetic absolutism
9. 36:31 — Axël, the servants and the Savage God
10. 42:00 — Meru: thought and the desolation of reality
11. 43:29 — Michael Robartes and the Dancer
12. 47:24 — The tree of knowledge and the dancer from the dance
13. 51:02 — Kleist, Rilke and the loss of innocence
14. 53:18 — Instinct, consciousness and the new elite
15. 56:44 — The limits of art: poetry without salvation

Erich Heller — 1 recording in the archive.

Related reading: The Disinherited Mind by Erich Heller.

Related reading: The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Ladies and gentlemen, William Butler Yeats came into contact with Nietzsche's thought in the summer of 1902. Only two years after the philosopher's death, but fourteen years after his mind had been extinguished, In that catastrophic ecstasy, which is recorded in one of the last pieces of coherent, if mad, prose written by Nietzsche: a postcard mailed at Turin railway station on the fourth of January 1889 and addressed to his young friend, the composer Peter Gast, to my maestro Pietro, it said, and then came the Orphic injunction, sing a new song for me. The world is transfigured, and all the heavens rejoice. The signature was the crucified. This note carrying to the young composer not only that strange, exalted musical commission, But also implicitly the terrible news of Nietzsche's mental collapse is in all the brevity of its text and the madness of its signature, the résumé of Nietzsche's early masterpiece, The Birth of Tragedy—a work which so intriguingly blends the learning and intuition of the classical philologist with the dithyrambic and confessional prose of a soul singularly initiated into the secret of beauty, that beauty lives upon suffering, that Apollo's command of surpassingly beautiful forms derives its power from the frenzy of Dionysus' dismemberment, inspired by Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism and aesthetic exultancy, as well as by the Romantic trinity of love, death and music upon which Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is founded. Nietzsche, in speaking of Greek tragedy and Greek art, had rendered, by analogy at least, the anatomy of the metaphysical body of modern aesthetics. "Only as an aesthetic phenomenon are world and existence forever justified." How unimaginably must those Greeks have been wounded by life, Nietzsche exclaimed to redeem life's horrors in such epiphany of the beautiful. Nietzsche, this Christian of the aesthetic passion, believed as early as The Birth of Tragedy in 1873, and not only when he sent his mad message to his composer friend, that It was the crucified spirit that at the height of its agony, acquired the power to transfigure the world through beauty, so that all the heavens rejoiced. "Sing a new song for me." There's no other poet of the twentieth century who sang as greatly even of his agonies, as did Yeats: "An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing…