Homer coming to life for me at last! It is striking how much familiar ground I am discovering here while listening to this; the stored mental imagery of Hamlet, Lear, and The Tempest rain down on what, to me, always seemed such a barren landscape of Ancient Greek stuff and nonsense. Did Shakespeare read Homer, or did he make his discoveries about life fresh from the world around him? and where does morality fit in to all this colliding of opposites, future and past, the waring states of good and bad? Telemachus, honest Telemachus, appears more and more like naive and vulnerable Telemachus, impotent but for Athena's prompting.
Athena seems to represent a mixture of soul and spirit mediating between the rumbling gods and Man, a female entity animating boys and men. Wide eyed immanence.
No great poet ever gets tangled up in the narrow-visioned window dressing of morality. The poet soars on the "antithetical balance loving nature of man" and knows how quick our devices to their contraries run.
It is amazing how just a little amateur theatrics reveals the highly stylised, metrical-musical language and sonority of Homer to be a vehicle for realism, or something deeper and better than realism. Shakespeare is the most apt comparison in my wheelhouse, but Dante was also a practitioner. Somehow (emphasis on the mystery) all the features that academics turn into formalisms of their verse, serve this end of sheer representation. The figure of Athena is at home there. Again, somehow.
Homer coming to life for me at last! It is striking how much familiar ground I am discovering here while listening to this; the stored mental imagery of Hamlet, Lear, and The Tempest rain down on what, to me, always seemed such a barren landscape of Ancient Greek stuff and nonsense. Did Shakespeare read Homer, or did he make his discoveries about life fresh from the world around him? and where does morality fit in to all this colliding of opposites, future and past, the waring states of good and bad? Telemachus, honest Telemachus, appears more and more like naive and vulnerable Telemachus, impotent but for Athena's prompting.
Athena seems to represent a mixture of soul and spirit mediating between the rumbling gods and Man, a female entity animating boys and men. Wide eyed immanence.
No great poet ever gets tangled up in the narrow-visioned window dressing of morality. The poet soars on the "antithetical balance loving nature of man" and knows how quick our devices to their contraries run.
It is amazing how just a little amateur theatrics reveals the highly stylised, metrical-musical language and sonority of Homer to be a vehicle for realism, or something deeper and better than realism. Shakespeare is the most apt comparison in my wheelhouse, but Dante was also a practitioner. Somehow (emphasis on the mystery) all the features that academics turn into formalisms of their verse, serve this end of sheer representation. The figure of Athena is at home there. Again, somehow.