That is indeed how I see the poetry having been transmitted to Homer. I
believe all artists who think that they themselves are the actual
source of their art are a bit insane. Whether art originates from
without or within, it is definitely from beyond "me" when it is real.
It's heard by the sensitive artist, who is above all an excellent
spiritual listener...
On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 12:44:44 -0500
"James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yes, I guess so. Only when the interior self is fully established
> and furnished -- i.e., in Western parties from the Age of Rousseau --
> can poets think of themselves as producing poems out of an inside,
> like a morbid secretion of self-ish genius -- hence the importance of
> the spider in such individualistic poets as Whitman and Dickinson.
> It is probably significant that the first word of our earliest poem
> is related to mania. (Quote: "The exhaustion of Achilles' fury
> exhausts the poet's principal inspiration, which Plato was later to
> call a 'fury' also. So ends the rhapsody of wrath." --jcn in Seidel
> and Mendelson, Homer to Brecht) A poem like the Iliad was given the
> poet by tradition, by a poets' guild, by an addressor generations
> old, by the musical offspring of a Memory gray before his or her
> protege/e "Homer" was born. Homer may have been blind, but he cannot
> have been deaf. Tragic Thamyris, in the catalogue of ships, had lost
> his memory, just as unheroic Thersites seems to have lost his
> genealogy, in the same book.
>
>
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