The Forgotten Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche Considered Himself a Poet. Why Don't We?
Cast roses into the abyss.
—NIETZSCHE, Uncollected Fragments (ca. 1883)
Nietzsche started writing poetry at age 9, and for the rest of his life he continued to compose it with an unrelenting ardor. If he did not continue writing poetry up until his all-too-young death at age 55 in 1900, he did at least continue to write poetry until his breakdown at age 44, in 1889. After that, his writing stopped altogether.
Despite the considerable amount of poetry that flowed from Friedrich Nietzsche’s industrious pen—he wrote about 400 poems total, according to some scholars [* see footnote]—Nietzsche’s status as a poet remains stubbornly underappreciated, if not outright ignored.
This Substack is about the poetry of German Expressionism, a period of time in the arts that occurred from roughly 1905 to 1925 or 1930 or so—I follow most scholars’ lead in dating this movement—but I’ve mentioned I would occasionally cover subjects related to—or “adjacent to,” as the fashionable saying now goes—the greater German Expressionist phenomenon. Nietzsche and his poetry certainly fit that bill. In that spirit I’ve included English translations of two of Nietzsche’s poems below.
Just as Van Gogh and Edvard Munch anticipated the Expressionist movement’s painting style, Friedrich Nietzsche and a few other writers anticipated its literary mode. Expressionist poet and critic Ernst Blass, writing about his own participation in Expressionism in the early 1910s, notes, “What was in the air? Above all Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Freud too, and [playwright Frank] Wedekind.” Rose-Carol Ashton Long mentions early Expressionists’ debt to Nietzsche as well, in her 1993 book German Expressionism:
The artists of the Die Brücke (’The Bridge’) group were among the first German nationals to be called Expressionists.[…] Inspired by Nietzsche, especially his portrayal in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the artist as the belligerent leader of a new morality, the group aimed to express their vision of spontaneity and renewal through the use of vibrant symbolic images that were defiantly antinaturalistic.
And Nietzsche frequently comes up in other Expressionist writers’ lists of influences from this era, too.
A not-insignificant number of Nietzsche’s poems were published in his lifetime, particularly in his 1880s book The Gay Science. Rather shockingly, early English translators of Nietzsche excluded his poems in editions of his work. But this is emblematic of a frustratingly common attitude that exists toward Nietzsche’s poetry: There’s an idea that his poems are superfluous, bizarre (or embarrassing), or—for some reason—just plain old unnecessary to know about. In a chapter titled “Nietzsche the Poet,” German scholar Olga Marx wrote, in 1973’s Gedichte: Deutsch-Englisch (“Poems: German-English”), that “Nietzsche himself sometimes regarded his gift for poetry with the doubts which beset all but the half-talented.”
On the other hand, Walter Kaufmann, preeminent scholar and translator of Nietzsche in the English language, vindicated Nietzsche’s poetic efforts by including his intended poems in his edition of Gay Science, and he made an essential point about the very title of Nietzsche’s work that underscores the importance Nietzsche did place upon poetry, both his own as well as others’: Citing Nietzsche’s view that modern notions of love and poetry were developed by troubadours in Provence (France) around 1100 CE, Kaufmann wrote: By “the fourteenth century the gai saber or gaia sciensa was still cultivated in Provence by lesser poets; and under ‘gay’ The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) duly lists ‘The gay science ( * Provencal: gai saber): the art of poetry.’"
The “Gay Science” is poetry itself.
In any event, Nietzsche wrote nearly 400 poems, an impressive number: It’s more poems than Edgar Allan Poe wrote. And it’s a lot more than the approximately 160 poems that were written by the 19th century’s overall greatest poet, Charles Baudelaire (most in one book). However, unlike Nietzsche, Poe and Baudelaire enjoy an unimpeachably poetic reputation. There thus endures an ironic situation wherein the godfather of German Expressionism, who practiced and lived the life of a poet, and who exerted a determinative influence upon the poetry and poetics of the Expressionist movement, is himself not accorded the fairness of being well-known as a poet.
One possibility is that Nietzsche wanted it this way. He was, if anything, an enemy of arbitrary or externally imposed labels and the attendant baggage that was wont to accompany them. Nietzsche felt externally imposed categorizations—things like “poet,” or even something like “brother”—all too often had the insidiously limiting effect of constricting possibilities for self-actualization. Imposed social and cultural roles, reflected in socially constructed categorizations, all too often, Nietzsche felt, brought along with them an array of consequences that, in their turn—intended or not—led to unasked-for role expectations and status pressures that, in their turn, produced undue psychological distress, social and intra-familial conflict, and introduced pernicious unearned guilt complexes, all of which eroded, in their ultimate effect, human psychological well-being and which also made life much more generally miserable.
Rather than inhabit a single position as “poet” or “philosopher,” Nietzsche seemed to prefer being a “man out of season”—and, in many ways, he remains just that. In a quatrain he included in The Gay Science titled "Verwöhnte Zunge” (or “Spoiled Tongue”—but which Walter Kaufmann gives the English title “Choosy Tastes”), Nietzsche wrote:
If it depended on my choice,
I think it might be great
To have a place in Paradise;
Better yet—outside the gate.
—which is a great, compact declaration of so much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
It’s tempting to compare this quatrain of Nietzsche’s (Aphorism 57 in The Gay Science) to a famous statement made by the Romanticist poet John Keats: “I feel confident I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine,” Keats wrote in an 1817 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. And it's tempting to think of the memorably defiant line pronounced by Satan in his great monologue from Hell that Milton recorded in Paradise Lost, Book I: “Better to reign in Hell, then [sic] serve in Heav'n.” Both Keats’ and Milton/Satan’s statements intuitively feel like something matching up with Nietzsche’s contrarian inclinations. But this is a bit off the mark as far as Nietzsche’s actual thought goes.
We’re wrong to assume that Nietzsche is somehow, for example, “a Satanist” because this poem proclaims he doesn’t care if he gets into Heaven. The lazy old dualism of “God vs. the Devil” that Christianity aggressively promotes does not jibe with Nietzsche’s worldview. A cogent reading of Nietzsche’s quatrain above reveals something that is actually contrary to Keats’ and Milton’s sentiments. Never one to cede ground to conventional notions of good and evil, Nietzsche is not saying, in his poem above, that he desires an existence “outside the gate” of Heaven because he would rather be a rebellious angel like Keats. Nor is he saying he’d prefer to reign in Hell than live in Heaven. What he is saying is that he wants none of the above. No Heaven, no Hell—but, for Nietzsche, the territory beyond them both. The real prize is a space of one’s own self-cultivated and independent self-actualization—the only place worthy for those who believe in attaining heights of Being through the conscious activation of all the latent potentialities residing in the self that are daily, actively repressed by the various forms of slave morality that afflict mankind under deceitful disguises.
Nietzsche, like William Blake before him, asserted that actual freedom was the natural state of the True Poet. (And Nietzsche and Blake have much more in common than many scholars acknowledge, often because the two thinkers—the two poets—used different, highly personal, terminology for what amount to the same concepts, frustrating attempts for many to find commonalities between both thinkers’ ideas. But this is something I may explore in a different post.)
Before I relay Nietzsche’s poem below—the point of this post!—I want to address something I said above I’m afraid gave off a wrong impression. I mentioned that Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire had written less poetry than Nietzsche, but I did not mean this as a criticism. Poe and Baudelaire are two of my favorite poets, as anyone who knows me can tell you. My point was that they are uncontroversially regarded as just that, poets, despite having written a great many fewer poems than Nietzsche. But my point was not that quantity trumps quality. Prolific writers and poets are not always the most talented of their lot—and Lord knows this is true. Often quite the reverse is the case. Cormac McCarthy wrote only 12 novels in his entire 89 years but he’s a tremendously better writer than, say, Danielle Steele, who, as of 2024, has written almost 200 novels. Her 200 books combined are not as good as a single chapter of any novel by McCarthy. So, while I mentioned above that Baudelaire wrote “only” about 160 poems, I did not mean that as a sleight. A single stanza from Baudelaire is worth more than one thousand poems from someone like Rod McKuen. (Sorry, Rod.) My point about Nietzsche’s proliferance as a poet was that, given how widely it’s already acknowledged that Nietzsche was an extraordinary prose stylist—Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra evinces a raw literary talent most novelists would drown their own children for—it is all the more absurd that Nietzsche remains neglected as a poet especially when, on top of his raw writing talent, he was a prolific poet also.
Below, one of my favorite of Nietzsche’s works of verse. It’s one of his later efforts.
“From the High Mountains” was a poem Nietzsche revised and republished in slightly different forms a few different times in his life. Originally, it was titled "Hermit’s Longing" (“Einsiedlers Sehnsucht"). The translated version below represents the version from 1886, about 3 years before his career-ending breakdown.
FROM THE HIGH MOUNTAINS (1886)
by Friedrich Nietzsche
The noon of my life has arrived,
and I feel I should have a solemn celebration.
O, summer gardens.
So, I stand here, and I’m happy—yet I’m also restless.
And I watch. And I wait.
I’m waiting here for my friends.
I’m always ready for them, day or night.
I start to wonder: Where are you, my friends?
Come! It's time. It's time!
Wasn’t it in your honor that, today,
the stoic grey glacier decorated itself
with garlands of roses?
And the clear stream waits for you too, my friends;
the riverside foliage bends its head in longing.
I watch as the winds push the clouds upward
into the tallest reaches of the high blue heavens—
and it’s all so that they may watch for your arrival
from the very best vantage point.
It’s in these great heights that I‘ve set my table for you.
Who else lives so close to the stars
That they become neighbors
with the very grey realm of the abyss?
But that is my homeland; and this is my homeland.
And whose homeland stretches further?
There’s a sweetness I’ve tried to offer: But who has
even tasted it…?
—Ah! There you are, my friends! Alas!
—But, wait… You say: I am not the one
you wanted to see?
And now you act hesitant. You even
seem stunned to see me.
—And now you’re saying that I—that I am no longer the same!?
My hands, my face, my gait—they’ve changed?
But what am I to you, my friends? I am your friend—
am I not?
Am I another? A stranger to myself?
Am I someone who somehow sprung out of myself?
Perhaps a wrestler who finally subdued himself—
Who, too often, resisted his own strength,
And was wounded, and who was always stopped
by his own victory?
You tell me that I seem to have sought out here,
in my new home, a place where only the most bitterly cold winds blow?
But—my friend… I have learned to live
Where no one lives! In the faraway desolate wastes.
And now you think I’ve “unlearned” man and god,
have “unlearned” all the traditional curses and prayers?
That I’ve become a ghost who stalks
among strange glaciers?
—Ah, but my old friends! How pale you look now!
Full of love—and fear..!
But, no. I think I understand. Just leave me.
Just don’t leave with any anger inside you.
Because it is you—it is you who cannot live here,
Here among these snowy peaks, where all is ice and rock.
Here one must be a hunter, and one must
scale the steep rocks—just like an alpine goat!
And, oh! Oh, how I have become a fiendish hunter.
—Just look at this bow and see how much I’ve used it.
That bend you see in it—it’s permanent now.
I’ll show you: The strongest was he who drew his
bow like this — —:
Ah, but now… Alas! Now there exists no arrow as lethal
As any one arrow that could be placed in my bow…
—So yes, fly away from here!
It’s for your own good.
But now that you do turn away… O, my heart: It has
borne enough,
And its hope has stayed too strong.
I must remember now to keep its door open
to the possibility of having new friends.
Let the old friends go!
Let all those memories go.
Oh, once you were young.
But now—you are younger!
What used to bind us all together? Hope's solitary bond?
And who still tries to read the stars
and all the signs within them?
Love was once inscribed in them.
—But those stars were all dying.
I compare it to the kind of parchment that
one suspects is actually flash paper: The hand recoils
from grasping it—it’s an awful discolored
paper, ugly and burnt.
So now that my friends are no longer my friends—what
do I call them? Those people I once knew?—
The right term is probably ghosts.
They might knock on my heart, or rap at my heart’s window pane sometimes,
And look at me, and gasp: “Were we even friends once…?"
—O, but once you did speak so many words to me like flowers,
and they blossomed when they came from your lips,
and they did bloom up between us,
awakened into their own springtime.
And then they wilted. And then they withered.
And it’s strange to see such dead flowers now, and think:
These dead things were once fragrant as roses!
O, the longing of a youth that never understood itself.
Those I longed for,
Those I had thought had become my very own kin—
They have all aged. And perhaps that has driven them away:
Only he who changes remains akin to me.
But the noon of my life has arrived. The second
time of youth!
O, summer garden.
I am restless and happy, and I am standing.
I am watching and I am waiting.
I await my friends, and I am ready for them,
day and night,
My new friends!
Come to me.
It is time. It is time.
This is Twilight of Humanity: German Expressionist Poetry in English.
Translation above Copyright © 2024. Do not use without permission. Email me or get in touch if you want to use this translation for something.
Thanks for reading.