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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... speech without rhetoric and a history without distance from the past. The poetry of the past fulfilled its design as long as audiences forgot the performing poet, and themselves, and everything but the vivid and painless presence of ...
... speech. From this I go on to articulate, as far as 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 ...
... speech that we now call poetry and had spoken about its nature, its way of proceeding, and even its structure and organization.8 Hence, while I recognize with Lord that our ideas of literary art may well be inappropriate to oral epic ...
... speech, and so on. There is little warrant in Homer for making formal considerations so significant in defining kinds of poetry. It is more fruitful to be attentive, as the first Greek critics were, to the “ethos,” or persona, presented ...
... speeches as if he were Agamemnon or Calchas; here he “conceals” his own identity (393C) and tries to “turn the audience's attention away” from what they see (dianoian allose trepein [392D]). Finally in poetry such as epic “simple ...
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 | |