The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche (review)

This collection ranges from the poetry of Nietzsche’s youth (1858) to that of his late sanity (1888). It contains all of Nietzsche’s well-known poems—those from GS, BGE, and the Dionysian Dithyrambs—as well as other published poems such as the “Idylls from Messina” not used in “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei.” These are included with more aphoristic pieces in sections entitled “Lyrics” and “Sayings.” The book finishes with a selection of numbered fragments and notes from 1882–88 gathered together under the title of “Through the Circle of the Dionysian Dithyrambs.”

The first section takes us from the youthful works of a fourteen-year-old (1858) to the more complicated work written about the time of Nietzsche’s enrollment at university (1868). It ignores a number of other verses that appear in the juvenilia dating back to around 1854. The youthful poems begin with a tone often suitably melancholic in a boy already obsessed with Germany’s spiritual heroes. They include brief expressions of elation and more somber, longer pieces, often dealing with regretted lost relationships with friends and the loss of his father and perhaps also his baby brother. The latter relationships are treated at some distance, which is understandable considering both died when Nietzsche was a child. Some poems also show an interest in an almost mystical relation with nature and life that often appears in his later works. There is a mention of “the Unknown God” who will figure strongly in his later work. We are reminded that at fourteen Nietzsche first refused to observe his and his pastor father’s religion, denying the value of the past and rejecting the possibility of a future in the church, certainly the career envisaged by his family. Perhaps the most interesting early poem is “Now and Formerly,” which reflects on past happiness and a present weariness that morbidly dwells on death. The ennui borders on self-indulgence and indicates that the Romanticism Nietzsche would later deplore had taken a firm hold in the teenage boy.

The second section of the collection, entitled “Lyrics,” puts together a number of later poems including “On High Mountains” from BGE and poems appended to other works. Many of these poems are immediately impressive for their strength, and it is striking to have them collected together. It is remarkable that almost all the mature poetry was written in early 1882, when Nietzsche had finished Daybreak and was beginning The Gay Science, and as he remarked later, during his trip to Sicily. One can speculate that such a journey was more suitable for writing poetry or perhaps that GS was already being planned with the prelude in rhyme, in which case it was a conscious decision.

It is not clear why Nietzsche embarked on the voyage from Genoa to Messina on April 1, 1882. He presumably made a somewhat spontaneous decision to visit the Graecia Magna, to visit the heroes of his youth. He probably sailed via the Aeolian Islands, as Stromboli is mentioned in the notes. His imagery concerning the sea, the islands, volcanoes, and the south is all taken from this voyage. The repeated use of such imagery as “the ridge between two seas,” the “fishermen with golden oars,” and “the Blessed Isles” also indicate Nietzsche’s obvious delight—and that he was lucky with the weather.

When he arrived in Messina, Nietzsche reports swimming in the straits, and it is clear that the Odyssey was on his mind. There is an upsurge in his Romanticist delight in the ancient world, tempered somewhat by reflection in the poetry and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The sight of Etna dominating eastern Sicily, of Taormina, and of the harbor at Syracuse and conjectures on Empedocles at Agrigento—all of these must have had a profound effect. Nietzsche was, famously, or for some, infamously, missing for two weeks until his...