Why We Need the Tragic: Schiller, Cassandra and the Rebirth of Tragedy

By David Gosselin

“Trust me, the fountain of youth, it is no fable. It is running
Truly and always. Ye ask, where? In poetical art.”

—Friedrich Schiller, The Fountain of Second Youth

There are prophecies in every age. The doom of empires and the fall of kings remain perennial themes because of their timeless reality. Poets have often been the bearers of these prophecies; in Western civilized culture, this gift of poetical prophecy is chiefly the preserve of the tragic, epic, and biblical traditions. The verses of David’s psalms, the dactyls of Homer and the tercets of Dante immortalized poets’ thoughts and ensured their transmission through enduring poetical forms.

As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry (1821):

Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it i…