By Andrew Laughlin Ford
Ford right here addresses the perennial questions of what poetry is, the way it got here to be, and what it really is for, concentrating on the serious second in Western literature while the heroic stories of the Greek oral culture started to be preserved in writing.
"Ford's Homer is an creative and sophisticated inquiry into old poetics, cutting edge in notion, trained yet now not pressured by way of exhaustive scholarship, and carried out in an obtainable and stylish kind. it's a mini-masterpiece that either the student and the knowledgeable normal reader will eat with excitement and profit."--Choice
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52L anata ( 1963) 8 - 9 ; cf. T halm ann ( 1984) 127 w ith notes. often quoted: defending himself to O dysseus, he boasts, "I am self-taught, and the M use has made stories / of every k ind grow in my heart" (Od. 347-348) . 54 To be sure, words (epea) are quite concrete entitles in the H omeric world: they may have "sh ape" and come forth fast and thick as winter snow (Od. 36 7; II. 222) , but it is not clear that H omer would think of different styles of speak ing as much as simply different speeches.
I4 4 8 b4 - 27, w here imita tion arises "n atu rally " in children, and poetry evolves from "im provisation s" to invective or hym ns and encom ia, according to the character of the singer. traditional, from the local to the Panhellenic, from the present to the eternal. In epic beginnings, then, w e see a sequence from proem to invo cation with a complex rhythm and function. By being mindful of the appropriate god on a given occasion, by "not forgetting," as they say, poets ensure the best hope of success.
Mally, it is initiated by an imperative ( "sin g," "tell," or "hym n") and a vocative to the M use (or M uses or goddess) . 16 Partly as a result of this heritage, certain elements of the invocation and their relative order were fixed within the limits of an oral art as the standard w ay of opening any particular epic song. First in the line comes an emblematic "title," meter permitting, signaled by its stereotyped form: most often it is a noun as the object of the imperative with a qualifier in the same line mak ing it more specific: "the wrath .