I recently been thinking about rhetoric, memory, and poetry and how they are interrelated. Along with the Odyssey, I have been reading Plato’s dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus. The dialogues discuss rhetoric as being a “knack” used for persuasion that does not necessarily have anything to do with Truth. Now, it seems to me, that if poetry were put into the equation, and Plato’s metaphysical memory, then Homer seems to embody the, what Plato ambiguously calls, “true rhetorician.”
Tag Archives: homer
Epic Poetry
In its strict use by literary critics, the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long narrative poem an a great and serious subject, related in an elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race.
Vico’s Homer
Vico, in his imaginative search for the true Homer, uses the language of reason combined with creative speculation and inductive hypothesizing. Homer, for Vico, is a metaphor for the citizens of ancient Greece. He did not exist as a man, but as a much more powerful entity who lived in the cultural consciousness of the entire nation. Homer himself became a myth — a integral myth for the emergence of Greek polity, poetry, and philosophy.
The Odyssey: General Notes
Homer’s Odyssey has got to be — still after multiple readings — one of my favorite works of Western Literature. This epic is a nostos, or a story of return, and asks can one come home again, especially after years of bloody war?
