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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... final outcome, a fixing by writing, of a long-standing art of oral performance and composition. For centuries before this transcription took place (and we are not sure whether it was in the eighth century Introduction.
... oral performances by many singers in many parts of Greece. It is not difficult to conceive that the very idea of poetry may have been profoundly different in a milieu where stable texts were never the primary and definitive form of a ...
... oral poet's milieu. This caution is necessary because our own ideas of what poetry is have been deeply influenced by nineteenth-century romantic idealism and eighteenth-century aesthetics. And if we seek a critical perspective closer in ...
... oral epic—a basic view of the poet, his role, and his activity to which Homer, his peers, and his audiences would have generally assented. The definitions of epic and the larger category of poetic epos lead me in the second chapter to ...
... through time. Even if we assume the two great poems were crystallized early as oral “texts” and then handed down by memorizing bards until writing became available, there is already in this process of crystallization.
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 | |