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paradox: harmony versus harmony. For Nietzsche, the Greeks longed to be at one with nature and “transfigure their genius and art” so that they “could glorify themselves... and behold themselves in a higher sphere... beauty...mirrored in their Olympian Gods.”25 Ironically, it is this desire for oneness that reverts “Silenus nihilistic wisdom” to an obsessive life replete with heroism as its fundamental value. For the Greeks their logos becomes “to die early is worst of all ... the next worst... to die at all.”26 As Nietzsche further suggests, at this Apollonian stage, the Homeric men long for existence in what Camus would affirm to be the romantic hero’s yearning: “Only the cry of anguish can bring us to life; exaltation takes place of truth.”27 “Sturm and Drung” and its followers, the Romantics, shrouded in this new dithyramb, welcome a new utopian era of expectation, promise and renewal where personal and political freedom shall be the new masters and conquerors of a new life; a new age where all patriarchal and authoritarian structures shall collapse (monarchy, feudalism, class orders) seeking a new order: capitalism, democracy and nature.
In this European revolutionary environment, Blake calls for a new humanity based on instinct, imagination and creativity: tragedy is welcomed again. Shelley, born restless and with a total disrespect for convention, evokes to integrate humanity and nature based on atheism and prophetic revolutionary
25 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995. 10
26 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995. 9
27 Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1991. 49
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