Dionysian Dithyrambs

Dionysian-Dithyrambs (German: Dionysos-Dithyramben) is a collection of nine poems written in the fall of 1888 by Friedrich Nietzsche under the nom de plume of Dionysos. The first six poems (Zwischen Raubvögeln, Das Feuerzeichen, Die Sonne sinkt, Letzter Wille, Ruhm und Ewigkeit and Von der Armut des Reichsten) were published in the 1891 edition of Also sprach Zarathustra. Other three poems (Klage der Ariadne, Nur Narr! Nur Dichter! and Unter Töchtern der Wüste) are compositions drawn from those found in Also sprach Zarathustra only slightly altered. Ruhm und Ewigkeit was published at the finis of the 1908 first edition of Ecce Homo; however, it is now deemed to be a requisite part of Dionysos-Dithyramben.

In January 1889, during his dementia, Nietzsche drafted "dedications" of Dionysos-Dithyramben to Catulle Mendès, a French poet, critic and novelist, an exemplar of Parnassianism, and author of the libretto to the operetta Isoline composed by André Messager, which made its debut at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris on 26 December 1888, in which he states his high regard for Mendès, calling him des grössten und ersten Satyr, der heute lebt—und nicht nur heute.

Today Dionysos-Dithyramben remains widely unread and is often not understood well enough; however, for some those colorful deconstructive verses represent an outstanding poetic achievement of pure Dionysian philosophy, or better yet, an essential entity with the deepest void of Dionysos.