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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... criticism since the nineteenth century has taken poetry to be), I am troubled by what we know of the history and origin of these texts. Though much is cloudy, it is now generally acknowledged that our Iliad and Odyssey represent only ...
... Criticism has long forbidden us to consult the putative author for the meaning of a text; structuralism has added that we can never emerge from the labyrinth of words to reach our author; and deconstruction warns us that if we got there ...
... criticism to us and views them apart from the entire world of epic in which they are fully defined. But to extract from the poems obiter dicta about art and poetry as we define them is to limit our evidence in advance and to beg the ...
... critics may wish to raise about how poetry works and what makes it unique must be answered in psychological terms, such as memory and forgetting, combined with phenomenological ones, the seen and the unseen. By connecting itself with ...
... criticism to literary “property” (as the common metaphors for tradition as a “storehouse” or “treasury” attest). A writerly accounting of tradition might assign to the poet as “his own” any language in his poem that has not been ...
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 | |