{"product_id":"the-first-poets-isbn-9780375725258","title":"The First Poets","description":"A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt\u003ci\u003e, The First Poets \u003c\/i\u003ebrings to life for the general reader the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStarting with the legendary and possibly mythical Orpheus and with Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, “the dirty old man of poetry,” to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses–the stories in \u003ci\u003eThe First Poets \u003c\/i\u003emasterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of these ancestors of our culture.\u003ci\u003ePreface\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI. Orpheus of Thrace\u003cbr\u003eII. The Legend Poets\u003cbr\u003eIII. Homer\u003cbr\u003eIV. The Homeric Apocrypha\u003cbr\u003eV. The \u003ci\u003eIliad\u003c\/i\u003e and the \u003ci\u003eOdyssey\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eVI. Hesiod\u003cbr\u003eVII. Archilochus of Paros\u003cbr\u003eVIII. Alcman of Sardis\u003cbr\u003eIX. Mimnermus of Colophon\u003cbr\u003eX. Semonides of Amorgos\u003cbr\u003eXI. Alcaeus of Mytilene\u003cbr\u003eXII. Sappho of Eressus\u003cbr\u003eXIII. Theognis of Megara\u003cbr\u003eXIV. Solon of Athens\u003cbr\u003eXV. Stesichorus of Himera\u003cbr\u003eXVI. Ibycus of Rhegion\u003cbr\u003eXVII. Anacreon of Teos\u003cbr\u003eXVIII. Hipponax of Ephesus\u003cbr\u003eXIX. Simonides of Cos\u003cbr\u003eXX. Corinna of Tanagra\u003cbr\u003eXXI. Pindar of Thebes\u003cbr\u003eXXII. Bacchylides of Cos\u003cbr\u003eXXIII. Callimachus of Cyrene\u003cbr\u003eXXIV. Apollonius of Rhodes\u003cbr\u003eXXV. Theocritus of Syracuse\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eGlossary\u003cbr\u003eBibliography\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments \u003c\/i\u003e“Exhilarating. . . . It’s hard to be temperate about Michael Schmidt’s loving, informed and deeply engaging survey. . . .  It would be difficult to imagine a better introduction to its subject.” \u003cbr\u003e–The \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Exhilarating . . . a learned feast. . . . Schmidt knows and loves poetry and has a marvelous feel for it.” –\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003eMichael Schmidt is the editor of PN Review, and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press. He lives in Manchester, England, where he is the director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.Orpheus of Thrace\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe left half a shoulder and half a head To recognise him in after time. These marbles lay weathering in the grass When the summer was over, when the change Of summer and of the sun, the life Of summer and of the sun, were gone. He said that everything possessed The power to transform itself, or else, And what meant more, to be transformed. WALLACE STEVENS, \"Two Illustrations That The World Is What You Make of It,\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What would a man not give,\" declares Plato in  the Apology, \"to engage in conversation with  Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?\" Can we  do something of the sort? If not to engage in  conversation, then at least to glimpse them as  they go about their holy and unholy business?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf I start with Orpheus, father of poetry, of  music and, some say, of the art of writing  itself; tamer of wilderness and wild hearts,  servant of Apollo and, paradoxically, servant  also of a new Dionysus; torn limb from limb as  Dionysus was himself; dissuader of cannibals,  maker of the ordered liturgies that displaced the  abandoned frenzy of the orgies . . . If I start  with Orpheus, it is to make it clear from the  outset that this is a history in something other  than the modern sense of the word. My Muse is  Clio, as she was Plutarch's and Pausanias'. My  Muse is Calliope, as she was Homer's and  Apollonius of Rhodes'. And Erato of the lyric,  tragic Melpomene, spirited Thalia shaking with  laughter at solemn, spiritual Polyhymnia, who  mutters prayer and praise. Orpheus is a hero, not  a god, and a hero more valuable than most of the  gods, just as Prometheus was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eModern historical scepticism must not bridle us  or we will have no Orpheus to converse with and  no stories to tell. There is a wealth of stories,  and they are worth telling, whether their truths  are literal, as they sometimes appear to be, or  indicative. Biblical scholars and theologians  argue that, when a tale in the Bible is  implausible, or is disproven by archaeology, it  may nonetheless contain a higher truth or impart  a truth of another order than the truth of fact.  Without suggesting that we are dealing with holy  writ or prophesy (though some see Orpheus as a  purveyor of the first and an exemplar of the  second), certain general truths exist within the  related tales about this and other poets, and  those truths emerge most vividly from the  particular landscapes and timescapes which the  poets may (or may not) have inhabited. Paul  Cartledge reminds us that \"the ancient Greek word  for 'truth' meant literally 'not forgetting.'\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI begin this book as a believer, then, and trust  that my faith will survive the pre-Christian  millennium of its journey. First, as I step  beyond the threshold of my book room into a  parched Aegean landscape, I know that there were  once springs and trees here in what is no longer  Thrace but a land divided between Greece,  Bulgaria and Turkey. A man called Orpheus was  born somewhere in this part of the world. We can  confirm very little about him--or, for that  matter, about Arion, Linos (said by some to have  been Orpheus' teacher, by others his brother),  Musaeus (his overconfident disciple? his son?),  or Amphion of Thebes. We can confirm almost  nothing about Homer and Hesiod, yet we have no  problem, even when we should, believing in them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOrpheus lived, and Orpheus lives. Everyone knows  his name and the stories associated with it. His  power was intact when in 1913, almost three  millennia after his death, the French poet  Apollinaire brought a band of young radical  painters together under the banner of Orphism.  Robert Delaunay, Fernand L’eger, Francisco  Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and others at that stage  shared a wild fauvist colour-sense and the kinds  of dislocation and surface foregrounding we  associate with Cubism: a tendency towards  abstraction, but always rooted in and answerable  to figures in the common world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eApollinaire's first Orpheus poem accompanies an  emphatic woodcut of the First Poet by Raoul Dufy:  strong lines, stiff-billowed drapery,  full-frontal nakedness, a proportionate penis, a  lyre in his left hand. The poem says:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWonder at this bold vitality And the firm lines' nobility: At \"Let there be light\" his voice was heard, In Pimander Trismegistus wrote the word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlready magic, hermeticism, mystery--the Egyptian  smoke-screen of Hermes Trismegistus, high-priest  of the obscure--are at hand, like three brocaded  Magi at a simple manger, complicating things.  They are inseparable from the first poet, and  finally they swamp him. All the same, at the dawn  of Modernism it was appropriate that the singer  who enchanted the beasts with his lyre and  charmed the trees to gather round him in  attentive groves should guard the door of  Apollinaire's Bestiary. He helps the French poet  to tame his animals in epigrams that contain but  do not confine them. Other poems by Apollinaire  relate to Orpheus, for example \"The Tortoise,\"  whose shell--a gift from Apollo--provided the  frame of his lyre. Apollo made a gift of his own  name to Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky  (Apollinaire), because the poet's father was  nowhere to be found.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat can we say for certain about Orpheus? First,  that his mother was Calliope, one of the nine  daughters of Zeus and Memory (Mnemosyne) and Muse  of epic poetry. Who his father was is less  certain: the prime suspects are an Olympian god  (Apollo) and an almost-mortal Thracian (Oeagrus,  possibly a river god, or a king who inherited  Thrace from his father, Charops, who helped  Dionysus establish himself in Greece and was his  devoted follower, inheriting the original  Dionysian rites). On balance, it seems probable  that his father was mortal, not divine: had both  his parents been Olympians, he would not have  been able to die. He did die, horribly, by  several different accounts and in several  different ways.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe travel writer Pausanias, whose Greece visited  in the second century ad is a world already  bleached by time, plumps for Oeagrus. Though the  traveller lived a thousand years after the poet,  he was two thousand years closer to him than we  are. We also doubt the place of Apollo in  Orpheus' immediate family tree because the  varieties of Orphic religion that grew out of his  name, though hostile to the unbridled Dionysian,  are certainly not Apollonian. The followers of  Dionysus, keen to introduce discipline and  ritual, to channel the energy and frenzy of their  rites, were attracted to his interest (if it was  his) in the soul's survival and residual  divinity. In his person and the stories that  surround it he seems to acknowledge the perennial  question: How shall we come to terms with our own  death? We will return to Orphism and its  metamorphoses. But Orpheus the man and his songs  are our quarry now. One conclusion of two leading  scholars of Orphism, I. M. Linforth and the  beguiling W. K. C. Guthrie, is reassuring: what  we know of Orphism is less a settled philosophy  or soteriology (a doctrine of salvation) than a  literature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOrpheus' hypothetical brother Linos was himself a  masterful singer. His ill fortune was to be  appointed tutor to the young Heracles, who  brained the poet with his own lyre when he tried  to discipline the unruly boy. In another story,  Linos is found challenging Apollo to a singing  contest, and the god slays him. More evidence for  Oeagrus: Apollo is unlikely to have slain his son  or step-son. Whatever the manner of Linos' death,  he was thereafter mourned with the ceremonial cry  of ai Linon (woe for Linos), a lament which may  have had a place in the rituals marking the  changing seasons. On the shield which Hephaestus  makes for Achilles in the Iliad (Book XVIII),  \"Youths and maidens all blithe and full of glee,  carried the luscious fruit in plaited baskets;  and with them there went a boy who made sweet  music with his lyre, and sang the Linos-song with  his clear boyish voice.\" Orpheus, too, has a  place, more prominent than his brother's, in the  cycle of fertility myths.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe know beyond all but the most wilful doubt that  Orpheus married, and his wife was the lovely,  young and innocent Eurydice. All the accounts of  their romance--and it was among the most often  told and sung of stories, until Offenbach reduced  it to laughter in Orpheus in the  Underworld--agree that they were a handsome and  well-matched couple. What did Offenbach find  comical? Innocent romance itself, perhaps, love  without ironic distance, without style if you  like. He may, too, have been impatient with  earlier tellings. We know how Orpheus loved  Eurydice; but did she love him back? She is  portrayed as the object of desire, she is ordered  about and obeys, but her own character is seldom  consulted. Even in Hell, when Orpheus charms the  God of the Dead, he reclaims Eurydice without  reference to her own will to resurrect. Jesus did  the same with Lazarus, and modern painters make  much of the Biblical line that as they unwound  the dead man from his shroud, he stank.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet us look a little more closely at Orpheus'  wife: she may provide clues to his character, and  he to hers. Some of the main sources for  information about Orpheus--in particular  Pausanias, whose description of the murals of  Polygnotus at Delphi is such a telling  reconstruction--do not mention Eurydice at all.  Orpheus went to the underworld, it would seem,  out of curiosity rather than love, or perhaps he  was a spirit of the underworld who escaped into  the upper air, and Eurydice was added by some  later romancer to give the first poet a credible  human motive and a credible human nature. Since I  have declared myself a believer, I take Orpheus  to have been an actual man with an actual harp in  his hand and a voice which, if we could only hear  it, would bring us a visionary calm. The vision  would be of the real forms that underlie the  phenomenal world we perceive, a characteristic  rather than a specific world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe did not go to Hades for fun: it was a serious  and perilous undertaking, of a kind that only  love motivates. Even so, it is not until we get  to Virgil and Ovid that the story of Orpheus and  Eurydice is fully developed--at least, those are  the first surviving poems in which it unfolds in  a familiar form; there must be many missing  transitional texts. One mustn't accuse Virgil or  Ovid of originality, of wilfully making fictions  of such importance. By the time of the Roman  poets, everything was done upon established  authority, and what was original was the way the  derived pieces were assembled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome poets, notably Hermesianax of Alexandria in  the fourth century bc, refer to Eurydice as  Agriope (\"wild-eyed\" or \"wild-voiced\"), a name  suitable for a nymph or a spirit of the wood,  which is what some poets thought her to be,  rather than a mortal woman who might die.  \"Orpheus and Agriope\" lacks the euphony of  \"Orpheus and Eurydice,\" and composers from  Monteverdi to Offenbach would probably have given  the story a wide berth had \"Eurydice\" not  prevailed. Eurydice: her name means \"wide  justice,\" Robert Graves says, or \"wide-ruling,\"  whereas Orpheus' name is uncertain. Graves  suggests that it might mean \"of the river bank.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOrpheus married Eurydice on his return from the  heroic journey with Jason and the Argonauts,  having had sufficient adventure by then to want a  quiet life. He and his bride settled in Thrace  among the wild Cicones. One day, out alone  \"gathering flowers,\" as the poets say, the young  bride was assaulted by Aristaeus (\"the best\").  Now, he was the son of Apollo, via a nymph,  Cyrene, one of the god's successful conquests. He  transported her to the area of Africa that took  her name, made love to her, and there she bore  him two sons, the elder of whom became a crucial  spirit of husbandry--hunting and bee-keeping were  his special skills, and some say he learned from  the Myrtle-nymphs of Cyrene how to make cheese,  and brought the cultivated olive tree to men. He  fathered some famous children himself, not least  the hunter Actaeon, slain by his own hounds when  he spied upon Artemis bathing in a spring.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike all fertility gods, Aristaeus was sexually  excitable, and finding Eurydice alone, he tried  to rape her. She fled, stepped upon a serpent  which bit her heel, and died. That is the story  Virgil tells. Aristaeus was punished. His bees  died, and he was forced to make atonements for  his wickedness (which, upon his aunt Arethusa's  insistence, involved snaring that most protean of  gods, Proteus, in his sea cave, and securing his  counsel). Proteus, according to Virgil, gave him  a severe talking-to:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An avenging spirit pursues you, crazed by grief, The ghost of Orpheus, calling for his lost bride. If the punishment that he gives you matched the crime The troubles you suffer now would seem like joys. Remember how the doomed girl fled, you ran her down In the deep grass by the river, and she could not see The venomous viper that lay along the bank at her feet.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eProteus tells the stricken Aristaeus the whole  story of the descent of Orpheus in vain quest of  his beloved. Then he tells him how to make  atonement to the gods, because he cannot atone to  man. Aristaeus follows instructions, and, after  sacrifices and other penitential exercises, a new  swarm of bees clouds out of one of the sacrificed  carcasses and into his hives. But nothing could  undo the consequence of his lustful act that  concerns us here, Eurydice's death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOrpheus had lived in hope, as Proteus tells, and  this is where the power of music and poetry, of  love and legend, come together in the great  Romantic story. A virtuous girl, a faithful wife,  she was running away from Aristaeus, but after  the snake struck, her legs no longer moved, she  floated on the strong current of death like a  figure from Chagall, out of the sunlight and into  the long dark caverns leading to the kingdom of  the dead. We must assume she went the same route  that Orpheus was to follow in seeking her, the  single route to Pluto's world, but because she  was a woman and her passage was the normal one  for a person dead, over the River of  Forgetfulness on Charon's rickety boat, past the  three-headed dog Cerberus with his three-jawed  slavering and three-throated bark, none of the  poets follows her. She, or her life, vanishes  from the face of the earth, and the next time we  see her is through Orpheus' eyes, when she is  already dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiscovering her death, Orpheus wanders in  sorrowful desperation. His music cannot calm him,  so he decides, after a period of lament and  ineffectual strumming, to seek her out in Hades  and persuade the dark gods to give her back.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301763338469,"sku":"NP9780375725258","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375725258.jpg?v=1767739353","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-first-poets-isbn-9780375725258","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}