Lyrical Immanence: Nietzsche after Romanticism (and Romanticism after Nietzsche)

TY - CHAP

T1 - Lyrical Immanence

T2 - Nietzsche after Romanticism (and Romanticism after Nietzsche)

AU - Woodward, Ashley

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - Romanticism has bequeathed a certain understanding of lyricism in terms of transcendence. Romantic poets such as Novalis, Hölderlin, the Schlegels, Wordsworth, and Coleridge developed a practice of lyricism with a corresponding metaphysics, more or less well worked out in their own reflective writings. Judith Norman has astutely analysed the role of art in relation to philosophy for the early German romantics in the following terms. Rational philosophy alone is thought to be insufficient because it cannot grasp the Absolute (such attempts fall prey to contradiction, as critical analyses of Fichte by Novalis and Hölderlin demonstrate). The Absolute can only be approched through feeling. Works of art enable such feeling in relation to something ‘upresentable’ – through techniques such as allegory, they produce high emotion combined with allusions to transcendent ideas such as God or Heaven, which cannot be directly presented. Often this was explicitly identified with a Christian world view. This resonates with Nietzsche’s view of romanticism as a kind of pessimism, which invokes transcendence out of despair and the inability to affirm this world (GS 370). Yet Nietzsche also wrote lyric poetry. The question this paper poses is this: Can we understand the function of lyric poetry on the basis of an immanent metaphysics? And if so, how? Norman (ibid.) has retroactively applied to romanticism Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between modern and postmodern modalities of the sublime, where the latter focuses on immanence rather than transcendence. The suggestion here is that an immanent ‘upresentable’ is expressed in artistic works through formal innovation, which evokes a feeling for what cannot be directly presented. The paper will examine Nietzsche’s lyric poetry – Ldylls from Messina, the Prelude and Appendix of The Gay Science, and Dionysian Dithyrambs – for evidence of such techniques. Beyond this, however, it will argue that an immanent lyricism can be both theorised through Nietzsche’s philosophy and identified in his poetic writings in terms of the bodily affects that these works evoke. In doing so, it will draw on the Dionysian aspect of Nietzsche’s ‘artists’ metaphysics’ in The Birth of Tragedy, and the immanent metaphysics of the will to power. Finally, the paper will suggest that we can retroactively apply such an immanent metaphysics to romantic poetry, reading what those poets themselves understood as signs of transcendence as, instead, signs of immanence.

AB - Romanticism has bequeathed a certain understanding of lyricism in terms of transcendence. Romantic poets such as Novalis, Hölderlin, the Schlegels, Wordsworth, and Coleridge developed a practice of lyricism with a corresponding metaphysics, more or less well worked out in their own reflective writings. Judith Norman has astutely analysed the role of art in relation to philosophy for the early German romantics in the following terms. Rational philosophy alone is thought to be insufficient because it cannot grasp the Absolute (such attempts fall prey to contradiction, as critical analyses of Fichte by Novalis and Hölderlin demonstrate). The Absolute can only be approched through feeling. Works of art enable such feeling in relation to something ‘upresentable’ – through techniques such as allegory, they produce high emotion combined with allusions to transcendent ideas such as God or Heaven, which cannot be directly presented. Often this was explicitly identified with a Christian world view. This resonates with Nietzsche’s view of romanticism as a kind of pessimism, which invokes transcendence out of despair and the inability to affirm this world (GS 370). Yet Nietzsche also wrote lyric poetry. The question this paper poses is this: Can we understand the function of lyric poetry on the basis of an immanent metaphysics? And if so, how? Norman (ibid.) has retroactively applied to romanticism Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between modern and postmodern modalities of the sublime, where the latter focuses on immanence rather than transcendence. The suggestion here is that an immanent ‘upresentable’ is expressed in artistic works through formal innovation, which evokes a feeling for what cannot be directly presented. The paper will examine Nietzsche’s lyric poetry – Ldylls from Messina, the Prelude and Appendix of The Gay Science, and Dionysian Dithyrambs – for evidence of such techniques. Beyond this, however, it will argue that an immanent lyricism can be both theorised through Nietzsche’s philosophy and identified in his poetic writings in terms of the bodily affects that these works evoke. In doing so, it will draw on the Dionysian aspect of Nietzsche’s ‘artists’ metaphysics’ in The Birth of Tragedy, and the immanent metaphysics of the will to power. Finally, the paper will suggest that we can retroactively apply such an immanent metaphysics to romantic poetry, reading what those poets themselves understood as signs of transcendence as, instead, signs of immanence.

KW - Friedrich Nietzsche

KW - German Philosophy

KW - Poetry

KW - Lyric

KW - Romanticism

M3 - Chapter

BT - Nietzsche's Rhythmic Thinking

A2 - Parr, Jamie

A2 - Mills, Philip

PB - Edinburgh University Press

ER -