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What our classes are beginning to remind me of, more and more, is the Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian split: the difference between rational and irrational, chaos and order, conscious and unconscious, mind and body, and maybe "interpretation" vs "against interpretation"? The Apollonian mindset always attempts to ascribe and create order in the manner that Sontag seems to be against.

Whitman seems like a pretty good example of the Dionysian mindset: his poetry is chaotic, frequently jumps from one subject to the next and is written in a free-verse form. He rambles. He declares that he has no problem contradicting himself. He celebrates nature, as well as himself, and he seems to be trying to describe the intuitive. He embraces paradox.

From what I understand, the purpose of our class may be to balance these two mindsets. Our professors seem to be suggesting that the Apollonian mindset is valued too much in academia and the Dionysian, not enough.