The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche

Uses the figure of the mad poet to explore the connections between madness and creativity.

In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry," Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality. She shows that the ph...