§0. In Part II of this essay, continuing now from Part I (Nagy 2021.04.17), I return to what T. S. Eliot said (1919 [1975]:38) about the poet he was in his youth—and about any aspiring poet in general: “the most individual parts of his work,” he said, “may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” In Part I, I applied this idea of… Read more
2020.07.03 | By Gregory Nagy The first edition of this book, a printed version, was published in 2002 by the Center for Hellenic Studies; that printed version has been replaced by a corrected online version. And that online version is now replaced here by this new online version, which is in effect a second edition, to be listed as Nagy 2020 in bibliographies. This second edition, launched 2020.07.03 in Classical… Read more
2019.04.12 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In an earlier posting, Classical Inquiries 2017.12.09, I have already expressed the intellectual debt I owe to Richard P. Martin’s book, Mythologizing Performance (Cornell University Press 2018). In the present posting, I follow up with a checklist of memorable wordings culled from Parts I and II of Martin’s book, to be followed in a later posting by a complementary checklist for Parts III and IV.… Read more
2019.04.05 | By Gregory Nagy §0. To celebrate, in my own personal way, the publication of a third edition of Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales, edited by David F. Elmer (2019), I have put together in the present posting a checklist of wordings I have found to be particularly memorable in the course of my many re-readings of the book over so many years. In future postings, I… Read more
2016.05.01 | By Claude Calame “In the vast treasury of the myths, the (Greek) poet chose in turn the legend more adapted to the ceremony he wanted to celebrate”—so Bruno Gentili in a study of 1966 with the title “Poeta—committente—pubblico.” The example of Helen as cause of the Trojan war through the abduction by Paris gives the best opportunity to illustrate the adaptation of the heroic narrative to the circumstances… Read more
