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Memorial (Hardback)
Short Description for Memorial"The Iliad" is an oral poem. This title presents the poem as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing.
Full description- Publisher: Faber and Faber
- Published: 01 November 2011
- Format: Hardback 96 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Poetry By Individual Poets
- ISBN 13: 9780571274161 ISBN 10: 0571274161
- Sales rank: 13,279
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Full description for Memorial
Matthew Arnold praised the "Iliad" for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. ""The Iliad" is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world...compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking". (Alice Oswald).
