Greek poet

“ Again we shall follow traces of a great poet—but never a favorite one—who has left markings of his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek’s delight in things of beauty, and a Greek’s subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun’s ears showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. ”

“ The Greek poet describes these things with the same vividness and freshness, the same kind of fondness, with which other poets speak of flowers; speaking of them poetically, indeed, but with that higher sort of poetry which seems full of the lively impression of delightful things recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is always naturally sympathetic with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. ”

“ These are the sort of contrasts which made Greek plays far more different from ours than is apparent at first reading. What we consider delicacy in play of feature, and grace of gesture, must have been impossible under the mask and tragic inflation of the figure which the Greeks thought necessary for its dignity. But of course the less the actor could do, the more the poet must compensate by the real excellence of his dialogue, and the pathos of his scenes. Thus the shackles of an art are often the very causes of its most splendid products. ”

“ Every Greek poet (I might indeed say every poet) is strictly the child of his day, the exponent of a national want, the preacher of a national aspiration, at once the outcome and the leader of a literary public, or at least of a public which craves after spiritual sustenance. From Homer to Menander this feature marks social life in Greece, and makes the history of Greek literature pre-eminently the history of the Hellenic people. ”

“ The epic poet merges his personality in his poems, the words of which he ascribes to the inspiration of the muse. The individual is nowhere, is forgotten in the subject and suppressed, while the luminous forms of gods and heroes move serenely across the stage, summoned and marshalled by the maidens of Helicon. In no other period of Greek literature shall we find the same unconsciousness of self, the same immersion in the work of art. ”

“ Greek literature—poetry, and to a certain extent prose also—has these peculiar excellences to so signal a degree, because it stood, as no other literature has since stood, in intimate relations with the whole of the life whence it sprung. Greek civilization had a solidarity and unity, and withal a noble simplicity, that gave to all parts and elements of it a vital interrelation and connection. Life, the whole life of the city-state, and sometimes of the whole nation, was the poet's inspirer, regulator, test. ”

“ The Greek poet is certainly in the highest degree correct, faithful, and circumstantial in his descriptions of nature, but his heart has more share in his words than if he were treating of a garment, a shield, or a suit of armor. ”

“ The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
Yet in these times he might have done much worse:
His strain display’d some feeling—right or wrong;
And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages ”

“ It was not necessary for the Greek poet to capture his audience by a scene of bustle or excitement. And this left him free to do two things, both eminently characteristic of Greek art. He could make his atmosphere and he could build up his drama from the ground.
Let us take the question of building first. If you study a number of modern plays, you will probably find that their main "effects" are produced in very different places, though especially of course at the fall of each curtain. ”

“ If a poet laureate nowadays is asked to celebrate a great public occasion by a poem, he writes an ode or an{40} elegy, such as Tennyson’s “Bury the Great Duke, with a nation’s lamentation,” and sends it out to countless readers. The Greek poet, on similar occasions, would have a solemn procession, or a dance, or a scenic display, with appropriate music, to assist him. These environments secured two great qualities, or rather tended to secure them, for we must not assume perfection as a general result in any human product. ”

“ There was, in fact, no public occasion which the Greeks did not beautify with song.
It is entirely different with us. Our minister now performs the function of the Greek poet at marriages and funerals. Our funeral sermons and newspaper paragraphs have taken the place of the Greek encomiums. Our fiddles or piano do duty instead of the Greek dithyrambs, hyporchems, and other dancing songs. Our warriors are either left unsung, or celebrated in verse that reads much better than it sings. ”

“ When we pass from this large influence of Greek drama to that of the lyric fragments or the idylls and love stories of our modern poets, I am met by an old assertion of the pedants, that the Greeks were wanting in that love and feeling for nature which is the prerogative of the Romantic school. I see no such contrast between Classical and Romantic. Gray, the most classical of our lyric poets, was the first to insist upon the necessity of a poet refreshing his soul with the wild beauties of mountain scenery. ”

“ But perhaps by the expression of such doubts we do less than justice to the influence which a Greek poet might exercise upon the minds and dispositions of his hearers. Greek popular opinion was very much inclined to place the poet on a pedestal to which his modern representative would hardly care to aspire, and to which at any rate he could never attain. ”

“ The Greek is free, and kinder in her praise
Which she bestows upon poetic lays.
She calls all that which takes not essence by
A matter pre-existent, poesy.
So makes the world a poem: and by this
The great creator a great poet is. ”

“ If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is the consciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and more highly serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of the actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of history significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place of sovereignty in its scheme of values. ”

“ And just here lies much of the meaning of Greek poetry for the student of humanity. It is the spontaneous and universal expression of the life and character of the Greeks; it is the comprehensive interpretation of the essential qualities of the race; in it is sounded the diapason of the capacities of this people; it is, as Sir Richard Jebb has said, the "index of their capacity." Literature, especially poetry, is national life expressed, not, as to-day, an individual's "criticism of life." ”

“ Originality, except in things themselves nobly worth while, may be a bane and not a benefit. The originality of the Greeks led to the production of works of poetic art which in themselves, on their own intrinsic merits, stand supreme. It is the manifold and universal excellence of the several kinds of Greek poetry—their perennial freshness, vigor, spontaneous vitality, their lucidity and their enkindling light—more than anything else that establishes the claim of Greek literature to its high place in the traditions and elements of civilization. ”

“ And to the second contention we can only answer that modern poetry is in no sense a substitute for Greek poetry. It has, it is true, much that Greek poetry has not; so has Greek poetry much, very much, that finds no echo nor counterpart in modern verse. Modern poetry, modern literature, is supplementary to that of the Greeks. And the liberal soul that covets earnestly the best gifts, and all the best gifts, will seek and study and cultivate them both, with equal assiduity and strong endeavor. ”

“ In them we see a youth, ardent, unaffected, impulsive, generous, courteous, and outspoken, but indifferent to the serious interests of life; recklessly self-indulgent, plunging into the grossest sensuality, and that with so little sense of guilt as to appeal to Heaven as witness of the purity of his life: [119] we see a poet, full of delicate fooling and of love for the beautiful, with a strong lyrical impulse fresh as that of Greece, and an appreciation of Greek feeling that makes him revive the very inspiration of Greek genius ”

“ Amid all the ravages made by Time on the grand fabric of Greek poetry, there is none, perhaps, more to be regretted than that which has destroyed for ever works embodying probably the deepest thoughts and loftiest aspirations of the Greek race on the subject of death and the life beyond it. ”

“ But this familiar view of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known [111] concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm. ”

“ Perhaps the most marked instance of the poetic instinct of the Greeks, is their avoiding descriptions of personal beauty. Though they were permeated by the idea, and thrillingly sensitive to it, it is easier to tell what a Scotch poet regards as elements of beauty than what a Greek did. A beautiful person with the Greek is a beautiful person; and that is all he says about the matter. This is not true of the Anacreontics, or of the Latin poets. ”

“ Greek poetry, we say, is very direct, very simple, very free from irrelevant ornament. And yet when we translate it into English and look at our translation, our main feeling, I think, is that somehow the glory has gone: a thing that was high and lordly has become poor and mean. Any decent Greek scholar when he opens one of his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something lofty and rare—something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and direct. ”

“ I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this special quality of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that language were habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity and of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the minds of finer men. By ‘finer men’ I do not necessarily mean men who behaved better, either by our standards or by their own ”

“ Those unsuccessful attempts to articulate which are so delightful and interesting in a child shock and disgust us in an aged paralytic; and in the same way, those wild mythological fictions which charm us, when we hear them lisped by Greek poetry in its infancy, excite a mixed sensation of pity and loathing, when mumbled by Greek philosophy in its old age. ”

“ Finally, in the golden age of the Attic stage, the chorus dancers and singers were carefully trained, at great expense, and the dialogue became the masterpiece of some great poet,—and then the Greek drama, the most splendid creation of human genius, was complete.
The Three Great Tragic Poets.—There are three great names in Greek tragedy,—Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These dramatists all wrote during the splendid period which followed the victories of the Persian war, when the intellectual life of all Hellas, and especially that of Athens, was strung to the highest tension. ”

“ Their spirit is more authoritative, and less speculative than that of Greek poetry. They speak rather from the will and conscience than from the wisdom that has searched and understood the ways of life. Greek poetry strengthens the will or purifies the heart indirectly, by its truthful representation of the tragic situations in human life ”

“ Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words, thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray [Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," Atlantic Monthly, November, 1912.] has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:
"The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables produces a kind of dancing joy.... Greek lyric is derived directly from the religious dance ”

“ The Beginnings of Greek Poetry are found in the sacred ode, [Pg 137] the metrical response of the oracle, the festal song, and the ballad immortalizing the deeds of heroes during the mythical ages. The art of poetry was coeval with the first settlement of the peninsula; but its higher development followed the transfusion of Hellenic genius into the older Pelasgian race.
The earliest forms of poetry were hymns to the deities. The religion of the Greeks was a worship of Nature. Imagination peopled every nook of their picturesque land with supernatural beings ”

“ The Greeks had arrived at a high degree of civilization before they can be said to have possessed a history of their own. Nations far behind them in intellectual development have infinitely excelled them in this respect. The imagination seems to have been entirely dazzled and fascinated with the glories of the heroic ages, and to have taken but little interest in the events which were daily passing around them. Poetry constitutes the chief part of early Greek literature. We give specimens of both Greek poetry and prose. ”