Once Again: Why "Mazeppa"?

In his "Talk on Mythology," Friedrich Schlegel issued a call to modern poets to "earnestly work together" to create a new mythology that could serve as an inexhaustible fund of ideas for modern poetry; in this way, moderns would not be disadvantaged vis a vis their ancient counterparts who were blessed with an inherited corpus of myth and legend upon which to draw.

Lord Byron's epic treatment of the Mazeppa legend in his eponymous poem may be regarded as an ambitious attempt to answer Schlegel's call. Nietzsche's Zarathustra may be regarded as another. The work of Freud and his students, another; Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough yet another.

Sadly, the age of Scientism and its pious twin, Fundamentalism, intervened (the genius of Freud and Frazer were both deeply compromised by the former contagion). As a consequence, Schlegel's insight has been lost amidst the resulting noise and confusion.

The antidote: a renewed discovery of what Fred Beiser has termed "the Romantic Imperative"--the notion shared among the early German Romantics that poetry is more than words on a page that conform in some degree to particular agreed upon stylistic conventions. Poetry is a revolutionary ideal of human creativity; poets are those who embrace this ideal and carry it forward in their daily endeavors.

The goal is the Romanticization of the world: the insatiable desire for connection, the transgression of the artificial borders imposed between self and other and, yes, the embrace of Otherness as a necessary component of selfhood...

Hence, Mazeppa.