Page 19 - GALIET DIONYSUS´RETURN: Good and Evil Dithyrambs IV

Therefore, Blake, Shelley and Byron reflect on the tensions between the potentiality of the individual, his fate, his transcendence and the infinity of the universe; issues that deeply concerned the Greeks and encouraged Delphic wisdom: “Know thyself and you will know the Gods.” Whether the Greeks knew that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Blake) or that “pride ... at pretending more perfection...is the cause of Man’s misery” (Pope), I know that knowing oneself is a binary affair. One cannot know good without knowing evil or have night without morning, without sounding pedantic.
Consequently, romanticism is essential to discovering our natures. It is no surprise that Holderlin, one of the greatest romantic poets, dwells in the profound mythological vision that embraces the entire cosmos: from transcendence to the chthonic. Likewise, Keats dwells in the union between beauty and truth as the most perfect ideal: “Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth.” Keats knows that truth can only be achieved, not through Platonic repression of desires, but through Dionysian and romantic understanding: truth then becomes subjective rather than objective. Therefore, the Romantics resort to fate: all actions and reactions are God’s will because “violence is at the root of all creation.” If it were otherwise, why would a benevolent God have expelled Lucifer from his magic kingdom and justify his justice in what seems an unjust act? Yet God, does not kill Lucifer, he simply banishes him to the depths of hell. None of the romantic poets, to my knowledge, commit murder or kill themselves for the joy or despair of it (with the nihilists, surrealists and post-war poets we begin to see suicide
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