Lies, Fiction and Slander in Early Greek Poetry (1993)

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-118
Keyword(s):  
Greek Poetry

scholarly journals Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek World

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry

Phoenix ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 260
Author(s):  
Sylvia Barnard ◽  
Bonnie MacLachlan
Keyword(s):  
Greek Poetry

The Origin and Form of Aeolic Verse

1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
John Williams White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Greek Poetry

The Aeolic dimeter and trimeter constitute so considerable a part of Greek lyric and dramatic poetry that the correct apprehension of their form is a matter of great moment. The Greek metricians comprehended this rightly, in the main, but in the first half of the nineteenth century the doctrine of these learned men was supplanted by a new theory that attempted to apply the principles that underlie modern poetry to the explanation of the undoubtedly complex rhythm of these clauses. Many scholars persistently maintain this theory. It is not difficult to discover why it was invented (it is absolutely new) and why it remains attractive. That the quantitative rhythms and metres of Greek poetry should seem complicated to men whose language is accentual is inevitable, whereas modern metres and rhythms are notoriously simple. The limitations imposed upon poetic form by accentual speech are extreme. No modern poet, for example, has attempted Ionic or Cretic measures. Again Greek music was simple, and both music and dance were under the control of the singers, but modern music is a complex art, and casts language in an iron mould. Nevertheless musical expression must be the basis of comparison, so far as we allow ourselves to institute it, between ancient and modern rhythms. The attempt to conform Greek lyrics to the elementary—and uncertain—rhythms of modern poetry that is merely read or recited implies a fundamental misconception of relations. Greek lyrics were melic. Agathon, in the Thesmophoriazusae, sings as he composes. These Greek songs were never intended to be read by anybody, Greek or barbarian.

Problems in Greek Poetry

Phoenix ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Leonard Woodbury ◽  
C. M. Bowra
Keyword(s):  
Greek Poetry

The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue, Paschalis Nikolaou (2017)

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Maria Athanasopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Greek Poetry

Review of: The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue, Paschalis Nikolaou (2017) Bristol: Shearsman Books, 159 pp., ISBN 978-1-84861-567-0, p/bk, £12.95

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