The First Poets Read online

  Campbell, David A., Greek Lyric Poetry III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991)

  Theocritus of Syracuse

  Dover, Sir Kenneth J., Theocritus (London, 1971)

  Edmonds, J. M., The Greek Bucolic Poets (London, 1912)

  Gow, A. S. F., Theocritus (Cambridge, 1950)

  _____, The Greek Bucolic Poets (Cambridge, 1953)

  Hubbard, Thomas K., The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton (Ann Arbor, 1998)

  Hunter, Richard, Theocritus: A Selection (Cambridge, 1999) (includes Idylls 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13)

  _____, Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge, 1996)

  Hutchinson, G. O., Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford, 1990)

  Sens, Alexander, Theocritus: Dioscuri (Idyll 22); Introduction, Text, and Commentary, Hypomnemata 114 (Göttingen, 1997)

  Wells, Robert, Theocritus: The Idylls (Manchester, 1988)

  Theognis of Megara

  Edmonds, J. M., Elegy and Iambus I (London, 1931)

  Figueira, T. J., and Gregory Nagy, editors, Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Ann Arbor, 1997)

  West, M. L., Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (New York/Berlin, 1974)

  Other Texts

  McKeon, Richard, ed., introduction by C. D. C. Reeve, The Basic Works of Aristotle (Oxford, 1992)

  Herodotus, The Histories of Herodotus, translated by George Rawlinson (London, 1942)

  Pausanias, Description of Greece, translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (London, 1918)

  Pausanias, Guide to Greece: Volume I, Central Greece, translated by Peter Levi (Har-mondsworth, 1971)

  Pausanias, Guide to Greece: Volume II, Southern Greece, translated by Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, 1971)

  Plato, Ion, translated by Benjamin Jowett (London, 1871)

  Plutarch, On Sparta, translated by Richard J. A. Talbert (Harmondsworth, 1988)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Auden, W. H., The Portable Greek Reader (Viking, New York, 1948)

  Balmer, Josephine, Classical Women Poets (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1996)

  Bowra, C. M., Oxford Book of Greek Verse (Oxford, 1930)

  Davenport, Guy, Archilochos Sappho Alkman (Los Angeles, 1980)

  _____, Seven Greeks (New York, 1995)

  Fowler, Barbara Hughes, Archaic Greek Poetry: An Anthology (Madison, Wisconsin, 1992)

  Gow, A. S. F., and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge, 1965)

  Grant, Michael, ed., Greek Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth, 1973)

  Higham, T. F., and C. M. Bowra, eds., The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford, 1938)

  Holden, Anthony, Greek Pastoral Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1974)

  Jay, Peter, ed., The Greek Anthology (Harmondsworth, 1973)

  Lattimore, Richmond, Greek Lyrics (Chicago, 1960)

  Lobel, E., and D. L. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955)

  Miller, Andrew M., trans., Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Indianapolis, 1996)

  Mulroy, David, Early Greek Lyric Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1992)

  Paton, W. R., The Greek Anthology, Books I–VI (London, 1916–18)

  Snyder, Jane McIntosh, The Women and the Lyre (Carbondale, 1991)

  Stoneman, Richard, Daphne into Laurel (London, 1982)

  Trypanis, Constantine A., The Penguin Book of Greek Verse (Harmondsworth, 1971)

  West, M. L., Iambi et Elegi Graeci, Volumes I and II (Oxford, 1972, 1992)

  _____, Greek Lyric Poetry: The Poems and Fragments of the Greek Iambic, Elegiac, and

  Melic Poets (Oxford, 1992)

  A SELECTION OF SCHOLARLY, HISTORICAL AND GENERAL CRITICAL TEXTS

  The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1985)

  The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford, 1986)

  Adkins, A. W. H., Poetic Craft in the Early Greek Elegists (Chicago, 1985)

  Boardman, John, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 1986)

  Bowra, C. M., Early Greek Elegists (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1938)

  _____, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides (second edition, Oxford, 1961)

  _____, Landmarks in Greek Literature (London, 1970)

  Burckhardt, Jacob, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, translated by Sheila Stern, edited by Oswyn Murray (London, 1998)

  Burn, A. R., The Lyric Age of Greece (London, 1960)

  Calame, Claude, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece (trans. London, 1997)

  _____, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece (trans. Princeton, 1992)

  Cameron, A., The Greek Anthology: From Meleager to Planudes (Oxford, 1993)

  Campbell, D. A., The Golden Lyre: The Themes of the Greek Lyric Poets (London, 1983)

  _____, Greek Lyric Poetry (Bristol, 1982)

  Cantarella, Eva, and Cormac Ocuilleanain, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (New Haven, 1994)

  Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986)

  Doody, Margaret Anne, The True Story of the Novel (London, 1996)

  Dover, K. J., Greek and the Greeks: Collected Papers I (Oxford, 1987)

  Easterling, P. E., and B. M. W. Knox, eds., Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1985)

  Frankel, H., Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (New York, 1975)

  Gentili, B., Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece from Homer to the Fifth Century (Baltimore, 1988)

  Grant, Michael, The Rise of the Greeks (London, 1997)

  _____, The Classical Greeks (New York, 1997)

  _____, Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation (London, 1997)

  Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths (Manchester, 2001)

  Green, Peter, Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture (Berkeley,

  Guthrie, W. K. C., Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton, 1993 edition)

  Hazlitt, William, The Classical Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Ancient Sites (London, 1851, 1995)

  Jaeger, Werner, Paideia: The Ideal of Greek Culture, Volume I, trans. Gilbert Highet (Oxford, 1986)

  Jeffery, L. H., Archaic Greece: The City-States c. 700–500 BC (London, 1976)

  Jenkyns, R. H. A., Three Classical Poets (London, 1982)

  Kirkwood, G. M., Early Greek Monody (Ithica, 1974)

  Kitto, H. D. F., The Greeks (London, 1951)

  Lefkowitz, Mary R., The Victory Ode: An Introduction (Park Ridge, New Jersey, 1976)

  _____, Heroines and Hysterics (London, 1981)

  _____, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London, 1981)

  Lesky, Albin, A History of Greek Literature (Methuen, 1966; Duckworth, 1996)

  Lissarague, F., The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine and Ritual (trans. Princeton, 1990)

  Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales, second edition, edited by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000)

  Meier, C. A., Healing Dream and Ritual: Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy (Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1989)

  Murray, Gilbert, A History of Greek Literature (New York, 1897)

  Murray, Oswyn, ed., Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford, 1990)

  _____, Early Greece (London, 1980)

  Nagy, Gregory, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979)

  Osborne, R., Greece in the Making 1200–479 BC (London, 1996)

  Podlecki, A. J., The Early Greek Poets and Their Times (Vancouver, 1984)

  de Romilly, Jacqueline, A Short History of Greek Literature (Chicago, 1985)

  Rose, Peter, Sons of God, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, 1992)

  Seaford, R., Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford, 1994)

  Snodgrass, A., Archaic Greece (London, 1980)

&n
bsp; Snyder, Jane, The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome (Carbondale, 1989)

  Stehle, Eva, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in Its Setting (Princeton, 1997)

  Taplin, Oliver, ed., Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford, 2000)

  Thalmann, W. M., Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore, 1984)

  Veyne, Paul, Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, translated by Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1988)

  West, M. L., Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (Berlin, 1974)

  _____, Greek Metre (Oxford, 1982)

  _____, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992)

  Whigham, Peter, translator, The Poems of Meleager (London, 1975)

  Zanker, Paul, The Mask of Socrates, translated by Alan Shapiro (Berkeley, 1995)

  ON BOOKS AND LIBRARIES

  Casson, Lionel, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale, 2001)

  Diringer, David, The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (New York, 1982)

  Fraser, P., Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972)

  MacLeod, Roy, ed., The Library of Alexandria (London, 2000)

  Turner, E., Greek Papyri: An Introduction (Oxford, 1980)

  MISCELLANEOUS

  Apollinaire, Guillaume, Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée, illustrated with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy (Paris, 1911)

  Arnold, Matthew, “On Translating Homer,” Selected Criticism, edited by Christopher Ricks (New York, 1972)

  Branham, R. Bracht, ed., Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston, Illinois, 2002)

  Bridges, Robert, ed., The Spirit of Man (London, 1916)

  Butler, Samuel, Notebooks (London, 1902)

  Calasso, Roberto, Literature and the Gods, translated by Tim Parks (London, 2001)

  Calvino, Italo, Why Read the Classics? (London, 1999)

  Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red (London, 1999)

  Curtius, E. R., Essays on European Literature, translation (Princeton, 1973)

  Davie, Donald, ed., The Pslams in English (Harmondsworth, 1996)

  Ford, Ford Madox, The March of Literature (London, 1947)

  Frazer, J. G., Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches (London, 1900)

  Highet, Gilbert, Poets in a Landscape (London, 1999)

  Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets (London, 1975)

  Lissarrague, François, Greek Vases: The Athenians and Their Images (Riverside, 1999, 2001)

  Mitchell, Carroll, Greek Women (Philadelphia, 1908)

  Nietzsche, Friedrich, “Homer’s Contest” (1872), The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth, 1976)

  Radice, Betty, The Translator’s Art(Harmondsworth, 1987)

  Seferis, George, Collected Poems (London, 1982)

  Stoneman, Richard, ed., A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece (Malibu, 1994)

  Tomlinson, Charles, The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (Oxford, 1980)

  Virgil, The Georgics, translated by Robert Wells (Manchester, 1982)

  Acknowledgments

  The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following poems and extracts in this book:

  David Mulroy, Early Greek Lyric Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1992), by permission of the publisher; Apollonios Rhodios, The Argonautika: The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece, edited and translated by Peter Green (University of California Press, 1997), by permission of the publisher; Virgil, The Georgics, edited and translated by Robert Wells (Carcanet Press Ltd, 1982), by permission of the publisher; Elaine Feinstein, editor, After Pushkin (Carcanet Press Ltd., 1999), by permission of the publisher; Guy Davenport, Thasos and Ohio (Carcanet Press Ltd., 1985), by permission of the publisher; William Carlos Williams, Complete Poems I and II (Carcanet Press Ltd., 1987, 1988), by permission of the publisher; Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics, second edition (University of Chicago Press, 1949, 1955 and 1960), by permission of the publisher; Pindar, The Odes, translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1947), by permission of the publisher; Wallace Stevens, “Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It” II, from Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1955), by permission of the publisher; Ezra Pound, “Lustra” and “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Collected Shorter Poems (Faber & Faber, 1968), by permission of the publisher; David Campbell, editor and translator, Greek Lyric I: Sappho and Alcaeus, testimonia 22 (Harvard University Press, 1982), by permission of the publisher; Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogony, translated by Stanley Lombardo, introduction by Robert Lamerton (Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), by permission of the publisher; Barbara Hughes Fowler, Archaic Greek Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), by permission of the publisher; Guy Davenport, Seven Greeks (New Directions, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1991, 1995), by permission of the publisher; Martin Litchfield West, Greek Lyric Poetry: The Poems and Fragments of the Greek Iambic, Elegiac, and Melic Poets (Oxford University Press, 1999), by permission of the publisher; Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Volume I: Central Greece, translated by Peter Levi (Penguin Classics, 1971), by permission of the Penguin Group (UK); Peter Jay, The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams: A Selection of Modern Verse Translations (Allen Lane, 1973, Penguin Classics, 1981), by permission of the Penguin Group (UK); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (Viking Press, 1954, Viking Penguin Inc., 1982), by permission of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Every effort has been made to contact holders of material quoted and reproduced in this book, but any omissions will be restituted at the earliest opportunity.

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  Read on for a preview of Lives of the Poets

  A stunning volume of epic breadth which connects the lives and works of over 300 English-language poets of the last 700 years.

  Lives of the Poets traverses the landscapes of biography, form, cultural pressures and important historical moments to tell not just a history of English poetry, but the story of English as a language.

  Can’t wait? Buy it here now!

  Preface

  My main guides through the changing worlds of poetry in English are poets, particularly those who take an interest in their art and that of their fellow writers. Down the centuries poetry has been singularly blessed with articulate practitioners. They maintain a continuous conversation with one another, across languages and centuries. Poets live so long as their poems are heard, assimilated, handed on. The echo of Dante in Eliot or of Sappho in H. D. or Adrienne Rich is part of the larger continuity in which all of us who love the art have a right to participate as readers or writers. Among poet-critics of the twentieth century, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, C.H. Sisson, Donald Davie, Derek Walcott, Eavan Boland and John Ashbery were congenial companions, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound exigent (if not always agreeable) masters. Earlier companions and masters include Sidney, Dryden, Dr. Johnson—who provided my title—Coleridge, Shelley, Poe…

  Lives of the Poets traces the development of poetry in English from the fourteenth to the threshold of the twenty-first century, taking non-English poetry into account when its impact is registered. When the book was written it could not have gone any further in time without becoming prophetic, and prophesies are always erratic. It could have started earlier, however. Lives of the Poets was launched in Cambridge in 1999, where my elder son, reading Anglo Saxon at the time, asked me why I had omitted the Old English poets. Chastened, I later put together a series of critical anthologies entitled The Story of Poetry, rooted in this book, and added the Anglo Saxon poems into the first volume, with a substantial introduction. At the launch of that book my son, still at Cambridge, said, “I think you were right in the first place to leave out the Anglo Saxons.”

  Would it make sense to start this history of English poetry as far back as 657, with Cædmon? The scholar and critic A.R. Waller thought so. “And from those days to our own,” he wrote a century ago, “in spite of periods of de
cadence, of apparent death, of great superficial change, the chief constituents of English literature—a reflective spirit, attachment to nature, a certain carelessness of ‘art’, love of home and country and an ever present consciousness that there are things worth more than death—these have, in the main, continued unaltered.” Changes may seem to us more than superficial, the thematic constants more complex than they appeared to Waller. Sixty years after him, his argument persisted. “Microcosm and macrocosm, ubi sunt, consolation, Trinitarianism—these are but some of the ideas and motifs,” wrote Stanley Greenfield, “that Old English literature shares with the works of later writers like Donne, Arnold, Tennyson, and Milton.” The English poets he calls to the witness stand undeniably deploy the “motifs” he lists, but those motifs, singly or in combination, are characteristic of any Germanic literature—indeed, of almost any literature we might care to name. Old English poetry was already remote in time and temperament from Chaucer and Gower, who are six centuries closer to it than we are. Its affinities with Langland and the work of the Gawain poet, and with the alliterative verse of Richard Rolle of Hampole and surviving shreds of popular verse are, apart from the alliterative tic, remote in tone and manner.

  The spirit of the Old English may survive in the Border Ballads but the line cannot credibly be drawn much further forward. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden used the old resources in selective ways, looking for antidotes to the prosodic decorums of their periods. But to them Old English was a language as foreign as Welsh or Icelandic, a poetic rather than an immediately linguistic or lexical resource. Old England is another country, Old English a language as foreign as German or Dutch. If we started there we would need to start again a few centuries forward. We are all the Norman Conquest’s post-colonials. I leave out the Anglo Saxons once again.

  * * *

  The aspects of poets’ lives that matter in this context are those that gratuitously entertain us, for example the witch-crafted death of Robert Henryson, the libidinal vagaries of Robert Burns or the last medical consultations of Emily Dickinson; and those that clarify the development of their work and that of other writers. Inevitably, from the continuities between writers comes a sense of canon, though not a stable one. In each generation, some poets vanish, others re-emerge; only a few keep their heads continually above water even though, as in the case of Milton, fellow swimmers may do their damnedest to drown them for ever.