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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... 3 The Poet: Tradition, Transmission, and Time 4 The Text: Signs of Writing in Homer 5 Poetry: The Voice of Song Conclusion Bibliography Index Locorum General Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like Homer, I could not tell nor could I.
The Poetry of the Past Andrew Ford. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. Like Homer, I could not tell nor could I name all those from whom I have learned in the course of writing this book. For a peripatetic academic, acknowledgments must be an exercise in ...
... telling them how to receive it. But it is also clear that the “idea of poetry in Homer” will be not a doctrine, an illiterate's notes toward Aristotle's Poetics, but a way for a working poet to explain to his society, and perhaps to ...
... telling has the effect of bestowing a prestige and reality on a past which the poetry pretends merely to disclose. Thereby questions about the rhetorical form and literary structure of epic poetry are evaded, for form and structure are ...
... tell us how we must read his poems. For my part, I find that a sense of the historical context of a work enriches reading and indeed that poetry (even of the most revolutionary posture) is never made out of thin air but out of earlier ...
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 | |