In "The Gay Science or, The Joyful Wisdom," Nietzsche experiments with the notion of power. The book contains Nietzsche's first consideration of the idea of the eternal recurrence, a concept, which would become critical in his next work Thus Spoke Zarathustra and underpins much of the later works. The book's title uses a phrase that was well-known at the time. It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas...
