The First Poets

by Michael Schmidt

European poetry takes its bearings from a brilliant constellation of classical Greek and Latin poets and Biblical writers whose lives (where they are known as legend or fact) and work (as it survives) continue to inform our writing and reading, even as the original languages, once central to a humane education, fall into disuse. The poets’ stories, their loves, lusts and longings, the forms they devise, their rhetorical strategies, are vital in urgent ways, so that Ted Hughes finds new life through Ovid, Christopher Logue through Homer, Les Murray through Hesiod, Ezra Pound through Propertius, Seamus Heaney through Dante, and a host of writers through Horace, Catallus, Sappho and others. In this book Michael Schmidt writes about the twenty classical poets who have had most influence. The obvious ones – Homer, David, Dante, Virgil – gain from the presence of important lesser-known writers including for instance the lyricist Anacreon, Theocritus the father of pastoral, and Boethius who haunted the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Where the lives are verifiable they are fascinating – and the miracle that these people became writers and that their work survives. Where true lives are shrouded in mystery, later writers and readers provide narratives of their own. We know more about Homer than Homer could ever know about himself. The classics have been alive for more than a millennium in our literature. The object of this book is to entertain, inform and create an awareness of necessary these are poets out of whom our imaginations, like our literatures, are woven.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Classics, Ancient History

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 2004

About the author

Michael Schmidt is a literary historian, poet, novelist, translator, and anthologist as well as an editor and publisher. His books include The Novel: A Biography and The First Poets. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry and higher education. He lives in Manchester, England.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Collates the limited primary sources. Mentions various translations and secondary studies. Seems to lack the expertise to make new arguments.

[Dr G · Rating 3 out of 5]

The First Poets is a worthy reference text. I suspect many readers, perhaps most, will find something within it to expand their knowledge. It provides introductions to many poets, historical and legendary, from the five centuries leading in to the Hellenistic period. Schmidt provides some biographical information, sometimes soundly historical, sometimes historical with uncertain provenance, and sometimes, as for example, with “Homer”, the very uncertain folklore of the ages. He also includes fragments of the work of each, or of works attributed to them. And he includes commentary, sometimes ancient and sometimes modern, often with his own reasonably argued final judgment.
Quite a few of the poets he covers are little-known so it is useful to have some of their works available while reading the book. Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, at times even more comprehensive than Schmidt. I also had the Loeb Classical Library edition, Greek Iambic Poetry which, of course, has the additional bonus of being a parallel text.
Schmidt makes several important foundational points in his Introduction:
• “It is not accent or stress but syllable length and quantity that determine metre” in ancient Greek poetry.
• “Greek itself is vowel-rich; English tends to be more consonantal.”
• “In fact, as soon as we begin to consider metre we realise that there is no such thing among the early Greek poets as a standard Greek language. There is a variety of dialects, and this is one reason it was always considered important to give a poet, almost as a patronymic, his or her town of origin.”
• “It is not until the Hellenistic phase, and Alexandria in particular, the female experience is given substantial imaginative space, but poets who clear that space remain male… at the heart of early Greek approaches to the world is the individual agon or contest, the desire to prevail. Competition, battle and trial, besting and revenge, keeping face, retaining divine support, are compelling male motives.”
Schmidt has a wry tone which he offers every so often; he writes of Orpheus: “Some say he was around sixty-three years old when he met his death; others calculate two hundred and seventy. Since he was a hero, the second number should not be ruled out: heroes stretch the possible and the plausible.” He describes how a Roman citizen bought a statue of Poseidippus and had it remodelled as himself: “if we see the poet, he seems to be holding back a guffaw; if we see the Roman, he looks as if he is controlling wind”. Of Philetus “so thin, it is said, that he had to ballast himself with leaden weights in his footwear so as not to be blown over by the wind”. Schmidt decides to carry the imagery on a little further: “Time has winnowed away most of his work”. Boom boom!
At times, though, his unacademic style can be a little obscure: “Over time Homer, ‘the blind poet with seven birthplaces’, has appeared, multiple identities, then vanished like the Cat. He was erased almost completely for a spell in a compelling spate of scholarship into ‘oral traditions’ in the middle of the twentieth century. Now he, she, or it is emerging again, ghostly and attenuated and hedged around with post-modern quotation marks and disclaimers, but gaining a little in solidity with each new book and scholarly paper. The Cat seems to be materialising around the grin once more.” These stylisms can be grating. He proclaims that he will not use inverted commas for Hesiod or Hesiod’s father as “I want to spare the reader the irritation of so much evidence of caution, and in part because I believe – up to a point – in the Hesiod who emerges from the two substantial poems firmly attributed to him.” He refers to inverted commas as “tongs”! This is silly.
A lot of what I found most interesting was his commentary on the Iliad and the Odyssey . He refers to the Iliad’s “insistently male orientation and address… the unrelieved harshness of the underlying reality of the poems, the ways in which the libidinal element itself is made harsh. There are few lyrical moments, few moments of reflective repose. Intimacy is absent, even in the defining scene when Odysseus brings Penelope at last back to the marriage bed.”
“Achilles dies young, a hero whose fate is woven early; Odysseus is the hero who survives and suffers. Two types of man, then, and two models of action. Already in the Iliad Odysseus has his three epithets: ‘much-subtle’, ‘much-enduring’, ‘much-devising‘ ( polymetis, polytlas, polymechanos ). To him are entrusted those missions which involve tact and politic action. Achilles is too much himself to dissemble. Odysseus is the anti-type of ‘fleet-footed Achilles’. Thetis tells her almost-divine child that he can have long life (and obscurity) or early death (and glory). In Book XVIII, Achilles replies, ‘then let me die soon’. In this he is less Greek than Odysseus.”
“The Iliad concentrates its action in two primary settings: Troy, the Greek camp and the Trojan plain on the one hand, and Olympus on the other. The Odyssey focuses largely on two men, Telemachus and his father Odysseus. The Iliad builds towards death and destruction, the Odyssey towards the re-establishment of local harmony in the wake of the universal disruption of the war. Whereas in the Iliad things generally keep their shape and the world of cause and effect is brutal but credible, in the Odyssey we are in the realm of metamorphoses, of unstable identity.”
“what marks Homer’s Odysseus is his knack, at the level of instinct, of individual survival. Odysseus functions well in council because he speaks well; but he loses all his men, all his ships, and all but the last helping of treasure, as he makes his journey home in ten years, a return which took some of his fellow-warriors a couple of weeks.” “The most awkward in the Iliad is Agamemnon, the great king. From the first moment he speaks he is aggressive, assertive, shrill, unbrave; he needs to be calmed by venerable Nestor, he is a hot-head without qualities who alienates his chief warrior and puts the whole campaign, in its ninth year, in jeopardy all for the sake of a woman. Achilles makes it clear that Agamemnon is a coward and never leads his men but stays in the centre; he is a heavy drinker and has an insatiable sexual appetite. The poem tries to redeem them by comparing him with the gods.”
“Simplicity is the keynote of the Iliad’s structure, complexity of the Odyssey’s.” “The Iliad ’s structure, centred insistently upon the wrath of Achilles, brings every element together in a species of continuous integration. The Odyssey is, at its weakest structurally (and narratively most compelling), a sequence of episodes, a gallery of framed stories.”
Schmidt offers a fascinating view of how the story of the Trojan war moved from oral story-telling to written versions, and on to the study of the written account in Alexandria Library.
Of the other poets dealt with in the book, one can, perhaps, jump to a surprising generalisation, that the poets of this period and setting were notably vituperative, misogynistic, scatologically-obsessed, and paederastic, and Schmidt points out that, in all these regards, they were the forerunners of Attic comedy. Interestingly, he posits the idea that their paederastic proclivities might not have been as alarming to our sensibilities as we suppose: “The objects of praise were often young noblemen: the eroticism may sometimes have been conventional, without expectation of fulfilment.” Schmidt seems to gain some enjoyment, in an adolescent sort of way, from reflection on these. He writes coyly of Sappho’s love “taking forms that would have puzzled Victoria”. And in considering the possible source of the term iambic, he writes of “Iambe, an old washerwoman whom Hipponax, walking by the sea, found scrubbing her wool. He touched her washing trough (with whatever nuances we wish to assign to that”. It seems that in iambic poetry there is no end to the double entendres. Or to the overt smut: “Hipponax is among the first poets to defecate in verse, to reflect on the stench of faeces and the hungry, pestilential swarming of the dung beetles”
One of the features of Schmidt’s writing that I find myself less attuned to is his somewhat mystical identification of word-selection with a sort of Platonic essence. He writes of Sappho: “Even in translation it is possible to sense the force of her thinking, the way in which she feels a way through experience with the special language that poetry devised. She brings this language, in the strict prosodies she invented, and with a subtle sense of phrasing and the sounds words make, a quite perfect ‘pitch’ when it comes to the modulation of vowels and the patterning of appropriate consonants, as close as a language can come to the experiences of which she writes. Even when her language draws on conventional elements – the moon, the sea, time passing – she imparts to them a sense of the contingent world, of the voice which inhabits a pulsing body, a body which is alive in time.” This is very eloquent but similarly to T.S. Eliot’s concept of “objective correlative” it is, for me, inscrutably cryptic and unconvincing.
I found Schmidt’s comparisons of these poets with modern-day writers on the arcane side, and gratuitous: again of Simonides, “But it is likely that he would have been more at home with Baudelaire than with Wordsworth, with Eliot than with Frost, and, like it or not, when we are not sentimental, so might most of us.” Or we might not. This
Schmidt states in his Preface, “The oldest debt I owe is to the late Sir Maurce Bowra , Warden of Wadham when I was an undergraduate, who gave me texts (his own included) and encouraged my curiosity.” Given that accolade, it is not surprising that he refers to Bowra frequently in the text – twenty-eight citations are shown in the index; however, curiously it seems he feels that encouragement of curiosity was about as much as the mentorship offered. Is the acknowledgement really just an academic form of name-dropping? “C.M. Bowra insists that, for poetry, the move in time and space from Athens to Alexandria entailed a narrowing of imagination and expressive freedom: the ‘openness’ of democratic Greece is attenuated into poetic servility in Ptolemaic Alexandria. About these Syracusan women there is nothing servile, nor does the city they inhabit seem restrictive. Bowra forgets how centuries of poets served tyrants with praise: Pindar, his favourite, is hardly a democratic spirit. Poets’ lives themselves were, he declares, ‘narrower’, as though political integration and the acceleration of history it entails, the freedom to travel, the amazing resource of the libraries in Alexandria and elsewhere, the diversity of cultures on show, impoverished imagination. Bowra’s is an odd take on the growth of cosmopolitan culture, nostalgic for the brief stabilities of tyranny and democracy, with their very different dynamics and their fragmented poetry.” “Bowra insists that Theocritus loved ‘the country’, unlike, he says, Callimachus. If he loved the country, why is there not more weather? The very expression, ‘he loved the country’ is a sentimental anachronism.” These comments seem ungenerous.
So, I feel that The First Poets offers a useful overview, but I do not feel inclined to commend it unequivocally.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published in 2004, Michael Schmidt's masterful The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets has been given a new - and handsome - lease of life thanks to Head of Zeus. Deemed 'exhilarating' and 'deeply engaging' by the Washington Post, and 'an important new study' by The Observer, its republication will certainly delight history buffs in the English-speaking world.

Revered poetry professor Schmidt has focused upon our 'cultural ancestors'; those individuals who provided the foundations for our poetic heritage, the legacy which they have left behind, and the lasting quality of their work. As Schmidt explains, 'Things that inadvertently shape us draw upon structures, forms, legends, and myths that have their origin in ancient Mediterranean cultures'. Mythology and factual history have been merged most interestingly throughout, and Schmidt writes of figures we have heard of - Orpheus and Homer, for instance - as well as those who are rather more obscure, or who have been forgotten - Linos and Amphion, for example.

Schmidt's account is thorough, which will surprise nobody who has read any of his other work. The majority is comprised of sections which focus solely on twenty-three poets (indeed, the chapter about Sappho is particularly enlightening), as well as essay-length inclusions which deal with the likes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The depth of literary criticism from peers of the poets here is surprising, and many of the profiles which have been included are both entertaining and memorable. Several of the poets whom Schmidt has focused upon throughout his study have no lasting work, and very little of that by even the more famous poets is complete: 'some writers are at best a scatter of phrases, preserved by grammarians'. Despite this, he has wonderfully managed to fashion a six-hundred page tome from this subject matter, and every single page contains something of interest for the modern reader.

The entirety of The First Poets has been beautifully put together. Schmidt's writing is intelligent and lucid, but despite his credentials, it does not come across as a purely academic book; its very thoroughness, in fact, makes it accessible to everyone, whether experience with the works of the poets is held or not. In fact, reading the work of any specific Ancient Greek poets mentioned here is not a prerequisite; verses and fragments have been included and analysed at intervals. The First Poets is not firmly rooted in the ancient past; several more modern literary works have been referenced, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The First Poets is a wonderfully informative book, filled with an incredible amount of research.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a book for picking up and reading; it's a reference book. One would be least burdened and most delighted, I'd garner, by picking it up before/during/after reading one of the poets in the book (Sappho, Alcaeus, etc.). So, if you're about to read some Callimachus (in w/e language you'd like), why not spend time in between poems by reading what Schmidt has written?

And what has he written: This is a personal dialogue, and most of it is simply accumulation from extant sources about these poets. Each chapter felt like a Wikipedia page, which I do *not* say as a slight; I say it because Schmidt has amassed footnotes which lead to a bibliography that lets students find primary sources dealing with the poets in question. Schmidt gathers his sources and makes nosegays. Nosegays of delightful chapters—fanciful even, especially when it comes to poets who were legendary rather than factual—which lack the power and profundity of Schmidt's other book, Lives of the Poets.

If you're approaching this book after reading Lives of the Poets, set aside any expectations. You'll find little in common between the spines of these tomes. Schmidt's readings of Hesiod pale in comparison to his readings of Chaucer, and a chapter on Donne or Jonson elucidates their styles infinitely more than his chapters on Pindar or Anacreon. Why? The answer is simple: Schmidt is not a philologist of ancient texts. He can't offer original insights because he has no sight into the Greek. Schmidt opened my ears and eyes to innumerable aspects of the English canon through Lives of the Poets. By avoiding the high register of academic writing, Schmidt made a pseudo-autobiography out of the greatest names in poetry, even going out of his way to include many poets to whom Norton Anthologies would never lend a leaf. He did for English what Wilkinson did for Latin.

And that's precisely the problem with this book. Schmidt is a magister maximus in English letters—not the classics. He hasn't lent his life to the study of Greek syntax. He knows plenty about lyric metre forms, and can speak to the sounds of the Greek language, but he doesn't know Greek. I do not in any way wish to sell short the achievements of a man who has been of incomparable importance to the field of poetry. His work at PN Review is far greater than the tepid populism that's dogging down Poetry Magazine (and now Faber & Faber). Schmidt has brought brilliant authors out of obscurity, whether by reprinting them or putting them in translation. He has given a necessary megaphone to the voices of the 20th century's best latter-half poets, and he's continuing to do so in the 21st c. He has, furthermore, been very good to me. If you like Schmidt's prose—and why wouldn't you?—then you'll like this book. I liked this book, and I look forward to reading it again in brief bits as I supplement my studies on Greek lyric poetry. However, you'll find little mesmerising originality, an originality which—as I said above—is what made Lives of the Poets so magical.

[A V · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work is, essentially, a catalogue of the lives and exploits of ancient Greek poets. Although informative, the writer is clearly of some form of 'artsy' persuasion and writes as such. Sometimes the passages are inspiring, but usually do detract from the content of the work.

I would recommend that the potential reader of this book uses it as a reference work when discovering the poets which are covered in this work. As a integrated 'read' it is too fragmented: each poet is covered in a more or less standalone chapter. This book does not tell a story. Treat it as such.

Concluding on a positive note: the work contains far more detail on each respective poet than can be found on the internet. The author is clearly well aware of the primary sources regarding information of the poets. After finishing this book, you will walk away with a greater insight and feel into the early epic and epinicean tradition.

Lastly: if one was to select one chapter (therefore one poet) from this book as a general reading suggestion, the chapter dealing with Hipponax clearly jumps out. Very amusing and informative. Very dirty poet.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written for an erudite academic audience, this anthology of Ancient Greek poets includes snippets of poems and their various translations, mostly to illuminate stylistic and thematic differences among the verse makers and their influence on other great poets throughout history. Schmidt’s hermeneutical analyses are rather dry, but they provide excellent reference material for the serious scholar. Combining historical research on the poets’ lives, including his own visits to their birthplaces and homelands, “Schmidt walks a fine line between fact and scholarly conjecture to create vivid, animated, and wonderfully compelling portraits of these ancestors of our [Western] culture” (dust jacket blurb).

The First Poets:
Orpheus of Thrace
Homer
Hesiod
Archilochus of Paros
Alcman of Sardis
Mimnermus of Colophon
Semonides of Amorgos
Alcaeus of Mytilene
Sappho of Eressus
Theognis of Megara
Solon of Athens
Stesichorus of Himera
Ibycus of Rhegion
Anacreon of Teos
Hipponax of Ephesus
Simonides of Cos
Corinna of Tanagra
Pindar of Thebes
Bacchylides of Cos
Callimachus of Cyrene
Apollonius of Rhodes
Theocritus of Syracuse

[James Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The short essays in this book lift the ancient Greek poets out of obscurity. Thus informed the reader may better enjoy the foundations of poetry for the culture of the West. The portraits presented here combine facts and scholarly conjecture to provide a background that informs understanding both the poetry and the culture of Ancient Greece. While scholarly, the essays will profit the attentive reader who shares the author's love of Classical Greece.

[Santiago M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful overview. It might just be that you have to be deeply invested in the Classical world and poetry itself, however, learning about some if the first *named* poets and how it evolved and developed in the Greek world is something that I think everybody can enjoy.

[Joe Tristram · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exciting at the start but I found out became repetitive and I didn't finish it.

[John Hiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't care too much for this book. I mentioned when I began reading that I probably would only read the chapters about the poets that interested me. I figured about 20 or so, but I only ended up reading about 15. The author seems to be incredibly knowledgeable, but was far too scholarly. Even as an English major in college, I found this book to be written on a much higher level than my experience. It reminded me of a book I read about the mathematics contained in the pyramid at Giza...just too complicated to enjoy.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent reference, I recommend this book to anyone beginning a closer look at the poets of the Archaic Age in Greece.

[Rose · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn't finish - bad translations, attempts at settled historical context drove me crazy