As my regular reader (hi, Trev!) will have noticed, this blog has been rather quiet of late, as I’ve been struggling to keep my head above All The Things, but I cannot miss the opportunity to add another entry to the small but striking archive of Thucydides Poetry – not least because I’ll probably forget it almost immediately if I don’t. This one is especially interesting, as it hints at a whole tradition of post-WWII classical reception in Poland of which I knew more or less nothing; I would be rushing off to write emails to colleagues in Poland to ask more, except that they are high on the list of people whose deadlines I have missed… (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘poetry’
A Pin in a Forest
Posted in Musings, tagged poetry, Poland, Thucydides, Zbigniew Herbert on October 30, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Outnumbered
Posted in Musings, tagged Harold Bloom, poetry, quotations, Thucydides on August 27, 2019| 1 Comment »
You know, I think the following tells us something vaguely interesting about the impact of the Internet. In 1998, the critic Harold Bloom edited a collection called The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, which he had selected from a regular publication called The Best American Poetry, with an introductory essay, also published as part of a forum in The Boston Review (April/May 1998), entitled ‘They have the numbers; we, the heights’. It opens like this: (more…)
Art and Poetry, Poetry and Art
Posted in Musings, tagged art, classical reception, Felix Lupu, poetry on July 4, 2019| 2 Comments »
It’s holiday time, at last – many, many apologies to the people to whom I owe a draft chapter by last month, but I have a five-hour train journey tomorrow, in which it will get finished… In the meantime, we’ve been exploring Bucharest, which has the expected range of classical elements in its architecture, especially the deranged Ceaucescu elements; his immediate inspiration for a giant palace of government and enormous boulevards and parade grounds may have North Korea, but the design has hefty doses of Fascist futuro-classicism (though a lot fewer heroic figures than you might expect).
There were also plenty of neoclassical motifs in the collection of paintings from Romanian artists on the first floor of the palace. (more…)
Poetic Licence
Posted in Musings, tagged historiography, poetry, witchcraft on June 24, 2019| 2 Comments »
One of the interesting dynamics of Twitter is the way that it encourages imitation and development: predictive text games, variations on memes, daft hashtags etc, not all of which are designed to get you to reveal personal information that can then be applied to hacking your bank account. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of a platform that can at times be very depressing.
I think this explains why I sometimes have a similar response to things on Twitter that aren’t actually posted to provoke imitation (more…)
Shot By Both Sides
Posted in Musings, tagged Miklos Bánffy, poetry, Thucydides, Thucydides trap on February 20, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Obviously the current febrile atmosphere in British politics lends itself to quotations from Thucydides’ account of the stasis at Corcyra (though I must remember to look up his narrative of the coup of the 400 as well) – but, been there, done that, still deeply depressed by the state of things. Instead, let’s quote mid-C20 Hungarian political and novelist Miklós Bánffy, who in his Transylvanian Trilogy (which I’ve never read, but clearly need to; this reference comes via the Twitter courtesy of @simonahac, as apparently his wife is reading it) looks remarkably as if he’s referencing Corcyra:
Yes, it’s the ‘Centrists piss EVERYBODY off’ bit – those who presented themselves as reasonable moderates were the first to perish. It’s not an original reading, but it is the first example I’ve stumbled across from this period. (more…)
Thucydides’ Corruption/ And Technological Disruption
Posted in Musings, tagged Corcyra, poetry, Thucydides on August 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »
It’s ages since there’s been an episode of Poetry Corner here – mainly because, oddly enough, Thucydides doesn’t inspire an enormous amount of poetry. But there is not none, and every so often a new poet draws on the same powerful images of conflict and the crisis of civilisation that inspired W.H. Auden in 1 September 1939. Thucydides is, as ever, the dark prophet who anticipated our fate, not least in his terrifying account of civil war and social breakdown in Corcyra.
A storm had brewed over Corfu Isle
Thunder roared with the sounds of revolt
Moods had fashioned this weather a while,
All that was needed was a bit of a jolt.
Poetry Corner 3
Posted in Musings, tagged poetry, Thucydides on March 9, 2016| 6 Comments »
Approximately 97% of the time, the Tweetdeck column that monitors references to Thucydides churns through the same old quotations, some more or less accurate (interminable misspelled variations on the “secret of happiness is freedom” line) and some not (poor old William Butler continues to be robbed of credit for his “Scholars and Warriors” aphorism), plus intermittent bursts of the bloody Thucydides Trap whenever a new article on the South China Sea appears. But every so often it produces something entertaining or interesting; infuriated rants from students who’ve been told to read Thucydides, the occasional new quote (there’s one from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, favourite book of Anthony Powell, that I need to check to see if he’s made it up) and occasional Other Stuff. Including (drum roll) a new Thucydides poem! (more…)
Poetry Corner 2
Posted in Musings, tagged Peter Handke, poetry, reception, Sherod Santos, The Mountain Goats, Thucydides on August 12, 2015| 1 Comment »
I assume there must be a body of literary theory out there about titles, especially of short, ambiguous pieces and poems; the way they promise to be a key to interpretation, and certainly shape the reader’s expectations and influence her reading – but as a result clearly also have the potential to manipulate, deceive, draw her into position above the trap-door and so forth. This is certainly an issue when it comes to the (admittedly very small) number of extant literary pieces that mention Thucydides in their title and then deal with something that appears to be completely unrelated. Peter Handke’s ‘Noch einmal für Thukydides’ (1997), for example, which I’ve written about elsewhere, describes a series of trivial events on a March morning: a yellow leaf on the wall suddenly reveals itself as a butterfly and flies off, the snow begins to melt, and a crocus flowers; on the basis of the title, and Handke’s known interests, I’ve argued that this piece is engaging with different ideas of ‘realism’ as a style, closely associated with Thucydides – but maybe the whole point is that this is the absolute opposite of the things that Thucydides thought were important, battles and speeches rather than butterflies and the everyday. Maybe the title is simply intended as a provocation, or a joke. And one of these days I must have another go at working out what on earth The Mountain Goats‘ ‘Thucydides II.58’ has to do with anything, let alone Thucydides 2.58 (“Bed face at noon/ Strip naked, we can’t get free/ And doubling over in the street/ dozens just like me/ Spreading like a rumor/ spreading like a rumor.”)*
This edition of Poetry Corner offers another example: Sherod Santos’ ‘A Woman Named Thucydides’ (2010), which I found on the internet through a simple search for “Thucydides + poem”. (more…)
Poetry Corner
Posted in Musings, tagged Gershon Hepner, poetry, reception, Thucydides on July 2, 2015| 2 Comments »
The Internet is a wonderful thing, and one can discover all sorts of strange treasures in its wilder reaches – probably guarded by flying snakes and gold-digging ants… I can now add another item to the (admittedly very short) list of poetic engagement with Thucydides, which hitherto amounted to the poem by G.P. Grundy in the introduction to the second volume of his Thucydides and the History of his Age (1948), which I discuss in the preface to Thucydides and the Idea of History, and of course the second stanza of Auden’s September 1 1939. Gershon Hepner’s ‘Be the Rider, Not the Horse’ lacks the deep scholarly knowledge of the former and the contemporary immediacy of the latter (it was, Hepner notes, written in response not to any dramatic global events but to a review of Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: the reinvention of history), but I’m not going to turn down the chance to expand this section of my database of sources by 50%: (more…)
Sphinx 