Aristotle attributes the origin of tragedy to the use of the dithyramb of the revellers, and comedy to the phallic songs sung by them. The point is that love frenzy leads to poetry, and we have an illustration of it in the connection between the Bacchic rites and poetry, between love and art. The rites degenerated under the Romans and were soon suppressed by law.

Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the twelfth section of _The Birth of Tragedy_. It is the old story of the battle between the emotions and reason, the instinct and the intellect, problems which men as different as Hearn, Bergson, Nietzsche, Pater and Freud solved by seeking liberties for the instinct. Pentheus, who represents reason, is the enemy of Bacchus, but fascinated by him, loses his life; reason leads to death when it makes no concession to the instincts. The play was a protest by Euripides against his own moralizing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and Tiresius is, in the words of Nietzsche, that we must display a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of the emotional forces. Don't trifle with poetry and the ecstasies that produce it.The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his _Greek Studies_, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.

The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love, for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different nations.

True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth and Whitman, dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defenses of liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.

And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.

Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always 

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