Aspiring Beyond:French Romanticism, Nietzsche And Saint-John Perse

Abstract

This article attempts first to outline the understanding of human destiny in the works of French Romantic poets such as Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire. All of these poets present a sort of spiritual world as distinct from the real, material world in which they live, but their understanding of human life is firmly rooted in nature, that is, in the physical nature of human beings. Second, this paper considers the romantic notion of human destiny as it is developed notably in Nietzsche’s Will to Power. In spite of his criticisms of romanticism, Nietzsche also rooted his conception of human destiny in the physical and physiological nature of human beings, and at the same time proposed that human destiny was to go beyond. Strongly influenced by romanticism and by Nietzsche, the French Poet, Saint-John Perse, proposes a similar understanding of human nature. The third part of this paper shows to what extent Perse grounded the notion of“going beyond” in human physiology, notably in sexual desire, which he considers as a reflection of the divine in Man.