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Nihilism

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Nihilism is the belief that life lacks objective meaning, value, or truth, often leading to despair or radical skepticism.

Detailed Definition
Poetry confronts nihilism through stark imagery, irony, or existential reckoning. Yet it may also transcend it—by creating provisional meaning, beauty, or solidarity in the face of emptiness, turning despair into a catalyst for artistic or ethical response.
Example
Example in poetry:
T.S. Eliot’s "The Hollow Men" depicts postwar spiritual emptiness: "Shape without form, shade without colour"; Sylvia Plath’s "Edge" presents a perfected nihilism: "She has folded / Them back into her body as petals"; Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence appears in Wallace Stevens’s "The Snow Man," confronting a meaningless world; nihilism haunts Samuel Beckett’s poetic fragments on futility; nihilism is resisted in Tracy K. Smith’s "My God, It’s Full of Stars," which seeks meaning amid cosmic void.
Additional Notes
Nihilism (Nietzsche) diagnoses the collapse of values; poetic nihilism may despair (Eliot’s “hollow men”) or liberate (Stevens’s “supreme fiction”); students should distinguish passive nihilism (meaninglessness as dead end) from active nihilism (creating values anew)—a crucial tension in modern and postmodern poetry.
Also Known As
Existential Nihilism Moral Nihilism Cosmic Pessimism
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