by phillipw | Apr 14, 2020 | AN, GR, MA
The Truth The ancient Greeks are there. They do not hide The truth about themselves like holy priests Of papal Rome. The Greeks adored male pride And loathed it. They were not pure logic’s beasts: They gloried in their contradictions, found Them, not...
by phillipw | Apr 14, 2020 | AN
Were I to Believe in Angels’ Songs If angels, each one, had a message they Would sing to us, would each charge be the same, A Kyrie, an Adoramus te, Or Gloria? No, that would be too tame. I'm thinking everyone would be unique, Each text and melody enough to...
by phillipw | Apr 14, 2020 | AN, IL, ME
Ancient Greek, Then Church Latin, Symposium, Scriptorium “Readers of Greek poetry constituted an élite, as in the Middle Ages readers of Latin did.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 13 “The symposiasts drank rather too much-watered wine, wore crowns, perfumes and...
by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | AN, RA, VI
Nude in the Gymnasium, Dressed in Modesty at Home “For the ancients, poetry socialized people; for the moderns, it reflects or promotes alienation.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 10 The ancient poets, epic poets, taught Their boys to find the maleness meant for...
by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | AN, GR
Also Sprach Nietzsche “ ‘Why did the whole Greek world exult over the combat scenes in the Iliad?’ asks Friedrich Nietzsche. We modern readers do not even begin to understand them ‘in a sufficiently “Greek” manner’. If we understood them in Greek, ‘we should...
by phillipw | Apr 11, 2020 | AN, PO
Before the Internet in the Ancient World “Hellenistic culture was of necessity a culture of the book . . . : the age of the reader had arrived, and a poet was often a man speaking to a man, not to men.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 13...
