Homer: The Poetry of the PastAndrew Ford here addresses, in a manner both engaging and richly informed, the perennial questions of what poetry is, how it came to be, and what it is for. Focusing on the critical moment in Western literature when the heroic tales of the Greek oral tradition began to be preserved in writing, he examines these questions in the light of Homeric poetry. Through fresh readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and referring to other early epics as well, Ford deepens our understanding of what poetry was at a time before written texts, before a developed sense of authorship, and before the existence of institutionalized criticism. Placing what is known about Homer's art in the wider context of Homer's world, Ford traces the effects of the oral tradition upon the development of the epic and addresses such issues as the sources of the poet's inspiration and the generic constraints upon epic composition. After exploring Homer's poetic vocabulary and his fictional and mythical representations of the art of singing, Ford reconstructs an idea of poetry much different from that put forth by previous interpreters. Arguing that Homer grounds his project in religious rather than literary or historical terms, he concludes that archaic poetry claims to give a uniquely transparent and immediate rendering of the past. Homer: The Poetry of the Past will be stimulating and enjoyable reading for anyone interested in the traditions of poetry, as well as for students and scholars in the fields of classics, literary theory and literary history, and intellectual history. |
From inside the book
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... becomes ch), and used ê and ô to signal Greek eta and omega respectively. I have omitted accents where the form is unambiguous. But I have not been consistent where the literature on a word uses predominantly its Greek form (e.g., kleos) ...
... becomes a question about the view of poetry found in the poems, we are able to follow many philologists, historians, and students of comparative epic who have secured from these nearly anonymous poems an inventory of important ...
... becomes indispensable: it is all too clear that poetry is at best a sum of what many different poets in different times and places have decided to do with their different languages. If we realize that there is no universal and eternal ...
... becomes an emotional transport, but this experience is less like aesthetic contemplation than like presence at a divine epiphany or a necromancy. In grounding itself in magic and enchantment rather than rhetoric or history, epic again ...
... become fully apparent to us. Like other language we may call fictive, epic assumes a power by creating a reality that it pretends only to disclose. But these are our concerns because we want to know why epic will not finally declare its ...
Contents
Homers Muses and the Unity of Epic | |
Tradition Transmission and Time | |
Signs of Writing in Homer | |
The Voice of Song | |
Conclusion | |
Index Locorum | |
General Index | |