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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... poet, or the two poets, through whom, speaking or writing, rough but recognizable approximations of the Iliad and Odyssey first came into being, I cannot help wondering what on earth he was about and whether “poetry” meant for him and ...
... 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, “is to.
... 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 to receive and preserve a heroic tradition the unquestioned value of which ...
... poets, it cannot fail to be embodied in the poems, consciously or not. It is indeed part of the function of the poet at any time to take up or make up an idea of poetry and to communicate it along with whatever else he or she tells the ...
... poet and his audiences. Thus the fact that the idea of poetry is always changing and the fact that all poets must take up one such idea and in some way embody it in their work combine to make it necessary for us to consider Homeric epic ...
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 | |