ABSTRACT
After supporting the Nazis and Mussolini for decades, American poet Ezra Pound was finally captured by the Allies. During his imprisonment as a traitor, he suffered a mental breakdown. Tragedy suggests coherences and patterns that invite our rational consideration. The god Apollo has, after Nietzsche, been interpreted as the force of order and reason. The god of reason, numbers, music, boundaries, systems and order, and light and sunlight was the god of the Muses, after all, and he personally appears in many Greek tragedies. Plato identified tragedy so that he could exorcise it; others sought a tragic pattern to tame and use it. Aristotle focused on the pleasures of viewing a tragic performance: that its conflict, action, and resolution create a psychic purgation and release. Hegel offered the first thorough analysis of tragedy serving our human progression toward a serene, rational coherence. Tragedy has been interpreted as a protest against religious belief, that it is a secret agent for atheism.
