dave:
> Yeah, Rob. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether Sappho was a real person
or
> not, the construct 'Sappho' is a unified poetic entity (albeit one mostly
> made up of fragments) and much more so Homer.
Yo -- a single identity, historical or not, uniting the poetic corpus.
(BTW, Shakespeare's plays weren't written by Shakespeare, but by another man
with the same name.)
But there +is+ (I think) an historical faultline falling between Homer and
Sappho. Although "Homer" has a name, he's essentially anonymous (though a
coherent creative entity). It's when we come to Archilochus that suddenly,
people are talking about themselves. And Sappho and Anacreon lie on the
other side of that divide.
It's not just an epic/lyric divide either -- in English, we have the
anonymous period which would include both the epic Beowulf and the lyric
Deor, and run up as far as maybe Chaucer. By Ben Jonson, we have the bugger
assuming that the fact that a girl turned him down when he was on a walking
trip to Scotland would interest the poetry-reading public.
Sometimes I think that Kent with his heteronyms is harking nostalgically
back to a pre-individuated prelapsarian stage -- if we can't be anonymous,
let's fracture identity.
Late at night, and my brains are broken.
Robin
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