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Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 10:08:25 -0700
To: classics@u.washington.edu
From: Jack Kolb <kolb@ucla.edu>
Subject: Re: Greater than Orpheus
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> The Makers 
> by Howard Nemerov 
> 
> Who can remember back to the first poets, 
> The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? 
> No one has remembered that far back 
> Or now considers, among the artifacts, 
> And bones and cantilevered inference 
> The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, 
> So lofty and disdainful of renown 
> They left us not a name to know them by. 
> 
> They were the ones that in whatever tongue 
> Worded the world, that were the first to say 
> Star, water, stone, that said the visible 
> And made it bring invisibles to view 
>  In wind and time and change, and in the mind 
> Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world 
>  And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers 
> Of the city into the astonished sky. 
>  
> They were the first great listeners, attuned 
> To interval, relationship, and scale, 
> The first to say above, beneath, beyond, 
> Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, 
> Who having uttered vanished from the world 
> Leaving no memory but the marvelous 
> Magical elements, the breathing shapes 
> And stops of breath we build our Babels of. 
>  >>
>Poesie ist die Ursprache der Menschheit.
>
>Gott empfohlen, Ihr
>Pastor J.G. Herder
>Stadtkirche, Weimar

Acknowledged as such in the Horatian tradition (what I call the "golden
age" paradigm in my literary criticism course): Amphion and Orpheus as the
representatives (Sidney borrows them directly from Horace).  What other
classical critics employ this tradition?

Jack Kolb
Dept. of English, UCLA
kolb@ucla.edu
.