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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... ideas in his own terms, I have transliterated some Greek words and phrases. I have generally Latinized the consonants ... idea that the Greekless reader would be able to continue with less distraction (even perceiving English cognates ...
... idea of poetry may have been profoundly different in a milieu where stable texts were never the primary and definitive form of a song and where each performer presented himself only as the spokesman of a tradition and not as an ...
... idea” or “conception” of poetry, as it must be cautiously named, is by now a well-established subfield in Homeric ... ideas of what poetry is have been deeply influenced by nineteenth-century romantic idealism and eighteenth-century ...
... idea of poetry is itself finally a poetic idea, because it was at first an idea of poets. For this conception I take support from Wallace Stevens, a poet closer to us in time. “One of the functions of the poet at any time,” he claimed ...
... idea of poetry needs to be continually recreated and in projecting onto all poets his own concern with poetry as an expression of the idea of poetry. Such demands may seem not to apply to a poet like Homer, whose vocation was evidently ...
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 | |