LATTIMORE, R.,
The Poetry of Greek Tragedy.
Harper & Row, New York, 1966. 157p. Paperback.
'Professor Lattimore's choice of theme and title for this volume of lectures was presumably due to the auspices under which they were delivered - the Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectureship of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University.(...) What he does mean by 'poetry' is not so clear (...). He describes it as 'what is directed neither to the emotion nor the intellect, but to the imagination.' 'Plays do not merely enact and instruct; they make us see what is not there. But,'he admits, 'imagination does not exhaust the content of the poetical either.' Most of the book is devoted to the search for poetry in this sense in the three great tragic poets, especially in a few particular plays. In Aeschylus Lattimore finds the poetry in 'enlargement (...) the simple enlargement of presented data (...) Aeschylus brought the unseen, the not-present, remote persons and places, even the gods, into the dramatic activity, through the language, which is the poetry.' The most original and interesting, and the same time the most difficult and disputable, chapters of the book are the two on Sophocles. The poetry of Sophocles, we are told, lies in 'anomaly'(...). Lattimore's treatment of Euripides is on more familiar lines. He is the writer of modern outlook, working in a medium 'not of his own invention, or altogether of his own choice (...). His characters are thoroughly realistic. (...) In his concluding pages Lattimore disclaims any attempt to find a single key to Greek tragedy, and despite the general term, 'poetry', it seems doubtful whether he is really dealing with a single theme. But many of his thoughts on the plays are illuminating, and all are started with a freshness and vigour which make a readable and stimulating book.' (H.C. BALDRY in The Classical Review (New Series), 1960, pp.27-28). From the library of the late Prof. W. Geoffrey Arnott.
€ 11.50
(Antiquarian)