American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

John Cowper Powys’s characterization of reading Nietzsche helps to explain many of the writers’ attraction to his prose. According to Powys, “the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of ‘distinction,’ of remoteness from ‘vulgar brutality,’ from ‘sensual baseness,’ from the clumsy compromises of the world.” Contact with his words, then, provided these radical writers with a new imaginative apparatus, a new range of apprehension.“It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood,” conceded Powys. “It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day—with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the face.”