The roots of our current turmoil lie much deeper in the contradictions of modernity itself. Modernity has held out the promise of freedom, equality, and the transcendence of history. Everywhere, the creation of a modern moneymaking society has been experienced as both a dizzying excitement and a wrenching dislocation. Disrupting old religious and social structures, but often failing to fulfill its own promises of emancipation, it has created powerful counter currents of what Nietzsche termed ressentiment, “an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.” This resentment is outbursts through echoes of violence in poetry.