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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... song and where each performer presented himself only as the spokesman of a tradition and not as an artistically ... songs in that world. But of course Homer is hardly to be found: beyond the notorious historical problems of his identity ...
... song permanently which is not far from writing. The question then arises about the poet's relation to his poem as a fixed and lasting structure of his own words. A wholly oral poet may view singing as something he does, but one who ...
... song culture” of archaic Greece: at a time when few, if any, people would read poetry, the text of a song was a rare thing, and always of less importance than the vivid but fleeting and variable performance.2 In such a context “genres ...
... song.7 The tradition of poetry that matures in Greece with Homer had by his time developed, if not a theory of art, at least a steady and sure way of going about its business and, moreover, had evolved ways of referring to itself and ...
... song to sacrifice, was a sacred moment not to be casually passed by. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that by the time of the composition of the Homeric poems there was what Hermann Fränkel has called “an established art 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 | |