On the Seventh Solitude: Endless Becoming and Eternal Return in the Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche (review)

This analysis of Nietzsche’s poetry attempts to connect “the seventh solitude” with the fundamental concepts of becoming and eternal return, a fascinating claim for a notion that seems merely rhetorical. Another thesis of this book is that many of Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas are foreshadowed in his poetry, which does not seem to be controversial as the bulk of the poetry is included in published philosophical works. Nonetheless, one should be true to the earth and wary of poets, and I suggest that laughing and dancing are mere recreations from the “great seriousness” of overcoming nihilism. Still, a number of poems express fundamental Nietzschean themes and feelings, and it is with these poems that Sharma is ultimately concerned. The book generally treats Nietzsche’s poetry chronologically, reproducing most of the poems (in German), identifying themes, and often relating them to concurrent or later philosophical works. Sharma is a Germanist, but his overwhelming preoccupation is with the poetry’s philosophical sense—rather than technical aspects.

Beginning with early poems and including work up to The Gay Science, the first chapter discovers themes including melancholy, solitude, isolation, individuation, the poet’s travail, and the feminine. Exploring the young Nietzsche’s struggle with loneliness and his resignation to a life of solitude (43ff.), Sharma examines important poems from this time such as “The Wanderer” (47–51) and “On a Glacier” (51–55). He also introduces the notion of the feminine in a section that analyzes “The Little Brigg, called ‘the Little Angel,’” suggesting that the issue of “woman as truth” underlies the poem’s apparent frivolity; however, I find no contextual evidence to support this, Nietzsche himself describing the “Idylls from Messina” as “cheerful.” Nonetheless, Sharma challenges us to reread these works more openly, something that is undoubtedly rewarding. The chapter ends with an interesting discussion of BT and the Dionysian, comparing solitude and individuation (71–75), which raises a question of different forms of “aloneness.”

Sharma carries the theme of the feminine through to the second chapter, where his analysis turns to the artist philosopher and further poems from the time of IM. The notion of play is also addressed in both the sense of creating and destroying and the more self-conscious play with poetic language. Turning to poems concerning the feminine, Sharma does not seem to expand on these points as it is not at all clear that the female subjects of “A Girl’s Melody” or “Campo santo di Staglieno” have any clear connection with truth or play, and reading the poems with this possibility in mind does not create any openings for further interpretation. The latter poem is possibly based on the epitaph “Pia, caritatevole, amorisissima,” which is the title of another short poem, and is apparently an admission of sentimentality—kissing the gravestone of “amorisissima,” the one most dear. Some of the other poems from this period have a more obviously philosophical context. In “Rimus remedium: Or, how sick poets console themselves,” there is a return to the poet’s travail in relation to time (91, 98–99). It seems that sick poets do not console themselves well but face an “eternity of suffering” (98) with a dread that will soon be a feature of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Perhaps more could have been made of this, as it seems that the sickness induced by a glance into the abyss is central to the experience of solitude as a state in which a thinker is affected by thoughts that disturb and repel—the thinker in the process of murdering God. Nietzsche has a clear conception of this state of shameful anxiety, with its ambivalent relationship to humanity. Abandoned by values fleeing and destroyed, the self is unable to assume responsibility for others. Sharma considers “To the Mistral: A Dance Song” to express one poetic response that requires joining forces with the cold north wind—Nietzsche...