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This chapter examines the conflict between Thomas Percy and Celtic bard James Macpherson on the subject of literary antiquarianism. The rival claims of Percy and Macpherson on the literary establishment indicate that the handling of the source was crucial to the antiquarian reception of literature and its incorporation into the canon. The two writers derived their methodologies from opposing theories of British history to validate their respective ancient poetry. This chapter suggests that Percy's critical debate with Macpherson influenced the evolution of the literature canon into a hierarchy of physical texts distinct from the popular oral traditions which were codified as folklore in the 1800s.

This chapter examines the early history and the preparations made by Thomas Percy for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. It suggests Percy's putative anthology was influenced by two original materials: Samuel Pepys' collection of 17th century broadsides and Percy's own collection of 18th century broadsides. Percy started transcribing Pepys' broadside ballads in August 1761 and the following month he began to plan the publication of the Reliques. His editorial method was based on the relationship between oral and literary sources. This chapter also discusses the problems encountered by Percy in the printing of the Reliques.

This chapter develops the notion of χορεία, according to Plato’s usage of the term, as the proper, restored rubric within which to understand the rhythm and harmony of ancient Greek poetry in both its stichic and lyric forms. The approach to such poetry via the ancient dictum, ‘art is imitation’, is given a brief developmental history and then critiqued. The importance of dance origins for Greek metres is discussed, with comparisons to examples of modern European ‘survivors’ of danced epic verse as preparation for a new accounting of such peculiar phenomena in Homeric poetry as noun-and-epithet phrases (understood to be analogous to ‘signature lines’ in opera) and ring composition. A case is made that Homeric and other Greek texts are not language in themselves, but musical scores instructing the production of performed speech.

This chapter examines Friedrich Hölderlin's Sophocles “Notes.” Hölderlin's “Notes” to Oedipus the Tyrant and Antigone pursue two primary aims: on the one hand, they delineate the differences between ancient and modern poetry; on the other, they seek to define “the tragic” as it is manifested in Sophocles' works. The first task, in essence, goes back to the Querelle and its “revival” in the 1790s, while the second is uniquely idealist, though powerfully mediated by Aristotle's Poetics. Religious and historical conceptions form the link between the two aims. Both aims invoke the dynamic interchange of ancient and modern suggested in Hölderlin's letters and his concept of translation. The addition of notes to the Sophocles translation allows Hölderlin to make these dynamics explicit, and to advocate for a new approach to ancient poetry among his contemporaries.

This chapter examines the origins of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. It suggests that serious work on Percy's collection started after his September 1760 meeting with poet William Shenstone and publisher Robert Dodsley. This meeting inspired Percy and Shenstone to produce two books within five years. The first was Five Pieces of runic Poetry published in 1763 and the second, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, in 1765. Both books were published by Dodsley's publishing company.

This chapter looks at idealist thought on the difference of antiquity and modernity. The starkest statement of the opposition of antiquity and modernity comes in Friedrich Schlegel's On the Study of Greek Poetry. The essay, published in 1797, though complete by the end of 1795, has often been overshadowed by Friedrich Schiller's concurrent and independently conceived On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795–96). While there are surprising similarities between the two essays, their juxtaposition very often obscures a fundamental difference in intent: where Schlegel's essay is concerned with ancient poetry as a concrete historical phenomenon, Schiller's understands much ancient poetry as an example of the “naive,” a category that transcends history. Schlegel aims to outline a program for a creative relation to antiquity, while Schiller seeks to grasp the philosophical significance of differing relations to nature.

This chapter examines the ballads contained in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which was published in 1765. Though Percy's collection includes sonnets, songs, and lyrics, its contents were mostly old ballads. His working title for the collection was A Collection of Old Ballads and one of his principal printed sources was a three-volume edition of the same title. The old ballads in Percy's collection cover the subjects of border wars, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and traditional pageantry. Percy's adviser in the compilation of the ballads was William Shenstone.

This chapter examines the historical background of the printing of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The printing of the Reliques took James Dodsley two and a half years to finish. This chapter explores the intersection of the texts of Percy's different literary projects in the light of renewed advice from William Shenstone regarding the printing of the Reliques, and Percy's spiralling circle of correspondents. It also highlights the extant proofs and revisions made by Percy prior to the actual printing of the Reliques.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. This three-volume collection of ballads, songs, sonnets, and romances is one of the finest examples of the antiquarian tendency in later 18th century English poetry. This book explores Percy's research work for his book and explains his working method to show how his methodological assumptions influenced the late-18th century literary antiquarianism.

This chapter examines the influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry on English Romanticism. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge made public praise of the Reliques and admitted that their collaboration Lyrical Ballads was indebted to Percy. Thomas Evans based his Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative on Percy's works and Walter Scott collected in explicit homage to the Reliques. This chapter suggests that the faults in the Reliques made it irresistible to many readers who shared an eagerness to annotate and improve Percy's edition.

The introduction lays necessary factual and theoretical groundwork for the chapters to follow by describing the social contexts of the ancient wedding and love affair. The wedding is a markedly erotic moment, but love affairs, while often sharing or borrowing the discourse of the wedding, are unlikely to end in marriage. Greek and Roman norms differ at times, but the literary tradition provides continuity across cultures. In both societies, the wedding is more eroticized than the marriage. The poems associated with the wedding and the affair can be classified as types of occasional verse, deeply connected with specific social contexts. They frequently allude to details of the wedding ritual or of the symposium and its aftermath to suggest verisimilitude. Interaction between poetic discourses therefore implies interaction between social occasions.

Because form and meaning are inseparable in poetry, interpreters of First Isaiah should attend to matters of poetic style in these texts. Commentaries on Isaiah by Robert Lowth (1778) and George Buchanan Gray (1912), who also wrote treatises on Biblical Hebrew poetry, were characterized by careful literary sensitivity, but more recent interpretations have been less consistent in this regard. Despite a growing body of literature discussing particular poetic features or texts in Isaiah—much of which emphasizes the final form of the biblical book—the need remains for a thorough treatment of the poetry of First Isaiah. Because the study of ancient poetry necessarily raises historical questions, this volume will consider the likely historical contexts of poems in Isaiah and their probable reception by their original audience.

The chapter begins with a close reading of the poem that opened Loukillios' second book, arguing that its complex literary allusion and ambiguous political comment advertise the author's capacity for comic misdirection. Further close readings show how Loukillian skoptic humour emerges from carefully stage-managed detail and timing, and expects a reader aware of contemporary trends in Greek culture. Some jokes are based on subtle manipulation of satirical personae; others are broad slapstick rooted in the hyperbole of Old Comedy. Some elements are repeatedly re-used, and the chapter argues that Loukillios' books were structured for easy use at symposia rather than as artful literary compositions. The negativity of Loukillian humour (many skoptic targets meet wretched fates) is explained both with reference to material culture (skoptic epigram on papyrus is invariably in cheap copies) and the symposium's role in forging group solidarity. The symposium also provides a context for Loukillios' aggressive misogyny.

This chapter starts with the most accessible part of Aratus’ poem, the story of Dike (Justice). Hesiod’s Works and Days has long been recognised as a key text behind this part of the Phaenomena, but it is less often recognised that Aratus places Hesiod in dialogue with Empedocles as a means of negotiating concepts of time in the myth: historical sequence, in the form of Hesiod’s timeline of human degeneration, and cyclical time, in the form of endlessly-repeating cosmic cycle. The pattern of allusion reinforces the narrative, in which Aratus commutes Hesiod’s sequence into cycle, by converting Dike from a goddess, as she is in Hesiod, into a constellation. Further, I shall argue that we are to see Empedocles in Aratus’ text as a means of reinstatement of poetry; not poetry-as-myth, but poetry with a claim to cosmic truth, and therefore a good model for Aratus’ own undertaking in the Phaenomena.

Poetic language in the Western traditions subsumes two distinct categories of usage: elevation (whereby usage conforms to a conventional ‘high style’) and heightening (whereby meaning is enriched, often by mechanisms of defamiliarization). How should a historical dictionary of a dead language deal with literary, especially poetic, language? This chapter attempts to clarify the issues and sets out some principles for ‘literary lexicography’, with special reference to Liddell and Scott (LSJ) and ancient Greek poetry, and to Greek usage in the early and classical periods. The issues dealt with apply equally to Liddell and Scott and the Revised Supplement; for the most part the discussion will subsume both.

This chapter examines Vigny’s first collection of poems, tracing its evolution through several editions and discussing its illustration of a tripartite history of poetry that extends from the poetry of ancient Greece, through biblical poetry of the kind championed by Chateaubriand and the early Lamartine, to a poetry expressive of the modern world. Where Lamartine had revived the elegy and Hugo the ode, Vigny’s preference was for the ‘poème’, a form of narrative verse in which compassionate accounts of human suffering support the poet-lawgiver’s overt agenda of stoical acceptance and human self-sufficiency. For Vigny’s poet there is no God, no transcendent realm, just a world of literal fact to be interpreted by human reason for the moral guidance of others. Poetry as a form of pity thus lends a purpose to sadness.