The Aesthetics of Lyric Poetry in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

Both the ancient Greeks and the moderns, Friedrich Nietzsche notes in his first published work The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), held Homer’s objective art of epics and Archilochus’s subjective art of lyric poetry in equally high esteem. However, if a work of art, according to the modern aesthetics of such figures as Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, must be “objective,” how should the subjective artist, who, like Archilochus, creates his art form his own subjective experience, be understood? Guided by a clue from one of Schiller’s letters to Goethe in 1796, Nietzsche utilizes Schopenhauer’s theory of music in his consideration of the subjective artist, modifying it to meet the requirements of a modern aesthetics for the lyric poetry. In this article, after explicating the nature of the problem in details and introducing the poet Archilochus, I will attempt to clarify Nietzsche’s take on the matter, and, using some early unpublished notes, to explain some of the ambiguities of his position in The Birth of Tragedy, so that his late description of inspiration makes sense in this regard.