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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... things: Their feelings gathered in him like a wind And sang. They cried “It is a god that sings.” —W. H. Auden, Sonnets from China After reading the Homeric poems, and indeed after reading interpretations of them, I cannot help asking ...
... thing as poetry can be postulated. I have made these tensions the focus of each of my individual chapters, which treat the genre of epic, the status of the poem, the role of the poet, the nature of the text, and the idea of poetry ...
... thing, and always of less importance than the vivid but fleeting and variable performance.2 In such a context “genres” will be defined not by rules of art but by the protocols of socially constructed occasions. Such occasions may indeed ...
... things. Hence the writer who wrote down the Iliad began “Sing, goddess,” and the entire Homeric corpus refers to epic poems basically as aoidê, “singing,” an action noun, a word that names poetry not as text or aesthetic object but as ...
... enclose it as a single thing in itself. As Edward Said observes in his book Beginnings, “A beginning immediately establishes relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or.
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 | |