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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... possible to make the lines of my translation correspond to the lines of the original, even at times reproducing in English the word order of the Greek line, especially in Chapter 1 where such order is often significant. I have used ...
... possible to derive from these texts a good deal of information about the nature and function of poetry in that time and place. In fact, the Homeric “view” or “idea” or “conception” of poetry, as it must be cautiously named, is by now a ...
... possible the form in which Homer was working, for it was within or against such a view that he was a poet. Accordingly, in my first chapter I have set out to give the traditional definition of epic. Here it is necessary to synthesize ...
... possible in the poets' own terms, a common “poetics” of 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 ...
... possible to think of distinct, defined, and named kinds of singing in a song culture provided that we remember that such kinds were not constructed from the rules of an autonomous art of poetry but belonged to the entire organization of ...
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 | |