The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets - Hardcover

Schmidt, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297643940 ISBN 13: 9780297643944

Verlag: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

European poetry takes its bearings from a brilliant constellation of classical Greek writers whose lives (where they are known as legend or fact) and work (as it survives) continue to inform our writing and reading, even as the original languages, once central to a humane education, fall into disuse. The poets' stories, their loves, lusts and longings, the forms they devised, their rhetorical strategies, are vital in urgent ways - modern poets such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have drawn inspiration from them. In this book Michael Schmidt writes about the Greek poets who have had most influence. The obvious ones Homer and Sappho gaiin from the presence of important lesser-known writers including the lyricist Anacreon, Theocritus the father of pastoral, and Hipponax. Where the lives are verifiable they are fascinating. Where true lives are shrouded in mystery, later writers and readers provide narratives of their own. We know more about Homer than Homer could ever know about himself. The classics have been alive for more than a millennium in our literature. The object of this book is to entertain, inform and create an awareness of necessary presences: these are poets out of whom our imaginations, like our literatures, are woven.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Schmidt is a critic, poet and the publisher at Carcanet.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0297643940
• ISBN 13: 9780297643944
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar