Appreciations of Nietzsche as a so-called poet-philosopher reveal little about Nietzsche’s thinking about the poets and they pay insufficient attention to his conception of philosophy. This chapter offers a corrective by examining how he figures the task of the poets in his middle writings. The focus is on what he has to say about the poets in relation to the passions, as this provides the best way of approaching the problem. His criticisms of the poets – that they are fundamentally melancholic and that they too readily give vent to naturalizing impulses – is best seen in the context of his upholding philosophy’s classical concern with and teaching of the mastery of the passions. The concern with self-cultivation informs Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy at a deep level, and it also drives his reflections on the poets. Poets are significant because they assume the task of providing signposts to the future by developing images of what he calls “beautiful human beings.” I attend to Nietzsche’s interest in Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer in the final section of the chapter, since it is from Stifter that Nietzsche may have derived, at least in part, his conception of the cultivation of beautiful human beings.

Melancholy is an ‘epidemicall’ disease, Burton says, noting the multitude of causes which, along with human wickedness and inherent humoral imbalances, explain the extensive and increasing suffering he observes around him. His observations tell us little about seventeenth-century epidemiology, I argue. Moreover, the meanings accorded to seemingly familiar terms such as ‘disease’, ‘symptom’, and ‘epidemic’ rest on assumptions that leave them orthogonal to today’s standard etiological medical assumptions. Yet they find resonance within recent broad theorizing about the concept of disease, in public health emphases and alternative medicine, as well as in the larger health culture of our times.

In the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, writers across a range of political opinions had to reconcile their approval of martial ardour with their dread of popular violence. As a result, attempts to imagine patriotic ardour often coincided with, or coalesced with, attempts to encourage peace. This resulted in a melancholy call-to-arms. Writers linked collective support for war, or protest against it, with tranquilising communal mourning, or else focused on the wars of a lost past that preceded modern commercial and industrial relations, or else pushed the prospect of collective armed struggle for social justice stoically into an indefinite future. These strategies provided forms of moral insulation for like-minded communities. The discussion includes works by Anna Barbauld, Walter Scott, Helen Porter and Lord Byron, among others.

Albertus Magnus was not a physician but manifested a positive attitude towards medicine. His main interest was in harmonising Galenic and Aristotelian doctrines that seemed to overlap on certain subjects; thus, he created a medico-philosophical approach to many illnesses and how they develop. In his On Minerals he writes of the special properties of stones and refers to certain stones as being capable of treating such diseases as epilepsy and melancholy. Yet Albertus does not refer to the way in which these stones could act and affect the aforementioned diseases. Therefore, the question that emerges is whether one can detect passages in his oeuvre which allow us to reconstruct a possible medico-philosophical explanation for the way in which these properties became associated with specific diseases. This chapter’s aim is to attempt to gather the scattered pieces of information from Albertus’ work and reconstruct this potential medico-philosophical formula

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

Trakl was the master of transfiguration and poetic enigma. His poetry uses a very specific number of colours (black, purple, blue), strikingly simple rhyme and – at times obstinate – repetition to unmatched effects. The expressive quality of his poetry never amounts to dogmatic expressionism but relates, and reflects, the deeper qualities of introspection. It tries to identify the very roots of expression in the troubled human existence. His poetry originated in feelings of guilt (often connected with the biographical fact that he had induced his sister to the misuse of drugs) and utter desolation. We have seen already that to him the self-destruction of occidental culture was a certainty years before the outbreak of World War One. This chapter discusses whether it can be argued that Trakl’s poetry reflects, to a certain extent, an anticipation of the horrors that became manifest and unbearable to him already in the very first weeks of this European tragedy with disastrous global implications.

From the Iberian colonization on, the American Indians were understood based on their skin color and the place where they were living. They were imputed a corporal condition and/or a complexio linked to the preponderance of the melancholic and phlegmatic ‘humor’ which expressed a kind of specific morality and behavior according to medical discourse of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This chapter analyzes how these medical assessments were transferred to the American Indians with a high degree of generalizing essentialism in order to naturalize a condition of permanent servitude. This knowledge transfer used to describe them, implied a series of strategic analogies and correspondences among the generalized significations and representations of complex melancholy on the individuals in the Old World and the observed practices and behaviors of the Natives of the New World.

Is there such a thing as an English compositional tradition in the twentieth century? And if so, what is Britten’s place in it? Harrison Birtwistle thought not, and one can understand why. There is no obvious point of continuity from one generation to another: Parry and Elgar’s reference points are Austro-German, while Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s music is modally based and considerably affected by English folk music. Delius spent most of his life outside England, and his aesthetic and compositional predilections are the most difficult to relate to a tradition. Britten and Tippett both abjured what they saw as the stultifying nationalism of Holst and Vaughan Williams and embraced aspects of international modernism. Despite the fractures, however, there are aspects in common: it is through themes from English landscape and literature that connections between generations are most clearly seen: in pastoralism, for instance, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’; in the role of melancholy; in the preference for particular genres; and in the reworking of aspects of the English musical past.

Sadness and fear are usually considered as basic emotions. In society and in education, they are normally cast as undesirable, but also as partly unavoidable. This chapter examines sadness, fear, and anxiety in society and education. It argues that these feelings should not be judged as simply negative, devoid of value or positive function. On the other hand, they should be critically considered and explored, rather than simply accepted, in education and society. Neither good nor bad in themselves, feelings of sadness, fear, and anxiety can be righteous, functional, and normal, and interrelated with critical understanding. Yet they can also be problematic and pathological in other cases.

Grief permeates all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one’s sense of life and individuality collapses into something rote and mechanical. This chapter investigates how Hamlet the play, and Hamlet the character, exceed early modern conventions concerning grief in an effort to turn a harrowingly ‘common’ emotion into something much more ‘particular’. By moving away from established understandings of grief, Shakespeare’s play explores how this devastating passion might create new worlds of meaning and, in doing so, help set ‘out of joint’ ones ‘right’. At the same time, the chapter examines how an over-investment in the idiosyncratic nature of grief undermines and even callously contributes to other tragedies in the play, including Ophelia’s death and Denmark’s crumbling political order. Ultimately, the play dramatises both the difficulty and urgency of balancing the ‘particular’ and the ‘common’ when it comes to grief, even as it leaves the possibility of their coexistence unresolved.

British Decadence was, in large part, inspired by the poetry and prose of France. The cross-Channel traffic in advanced literature saw extremes of Francophobia and Francophilia in the British press, with writers such as Émile Zola having translations of their work censored and attacked in the House of Commons while receiving rapturous receptions when lecturing in London. A central figure in this traffic of Decadent literature was the poet Paul Verlaine, whose dissolute life scandalized the British public. As this chapter demonstrates, British writers took from their French counterparts both formal innovation and an antagonistic approach to moral orthodoxies. Verlaine’s queer sexuality and relentlessly self-scrutinizing approach to poetry came to symbolize for a generation of young English writers an intoxicating possibility of a poetic revolution against cultural hegemony. Verlaine’s lecture tour of England in late 1893 represents the highpoint of the British obsession with French décadence before the Wilde trials saw progressive literature retreat into the margins.