What is so special about Homer?

[Anonymous No.19336301]

I've read a decent amount of Greek literature but I don't understand what's so special about Homer. Do people just like the Illiad and Odyssey this much because they're both really old and have a lot of historical weight behind them?

Also, I'm Indian and we have our own Epics –– The Mahabharata and Ramayana. I like them too but frankly I thought the main reason people are into them is because they're really old and they're somewhat of a "cultural memory" of our civilization. Is this the only reason Europeans like Homer particularly? I just don't understand what makes it so unique or special in terms of literary value.

[Anonymous No.19336317]

>>19336301
>Years ago a musician said to me: 'But isn't there a place where you can get it all [meaning all of poetry] as in Bach?' There isn't. I believe if a man will really learn Greek he can get nearly 'all of it ' in Homer. I have never read half a page of Homer without finding melodic invention, I mean melodic invention that I didn't already know. I have, on the other hand, found also in Homer the imaginary spectator, which in 1918 I still thought was Henry James' particular property. Homer says, 'an experienced soldier would have noticed'. The sheer literary qualities in Homer are such that a physician has written a book to prove that Homer must have been an army doctor. (When he describes certain blows and their effect, the wounds are said to be accurate, and the description fit for coroner's inquest.) Another French scholar has more or less shown that the geography of the Odyssey is correct geography; not as you would find it if you had a geography book and a map, but as it would be in a 'periplum ', that is, as a coasting sailor would find it. The news in the Odyssey is still news. Odysseus is still 'very human', by no means a stuffed shirt, or a pretty figure taken down from a tapestry. It is very hard to describe some of the homeric conversation, the irony, etc., without neologisms, which my publishers have suggested I eschew.
- Ezra Pound, Abc of Reading.

[Anonymous No.19336323]

>>19336317
So Homer and the poets did have technē, get fucked Socrates

[Anonymous No.19336343]

>>19336317
>Homer is good because.... he just is, ok!

[Anonymous No.19336351]

>>19336301
>>19336323
>>19336343
There's no evidence homer existed

[Anonymous No.19336375]

>>19336323
>>19336351
This actually doesn't particularly matter to what I said

[Anonymous No.19336382]

>>19336301
He's the foundation of Western literature. His use of metaphors, emotional pathos, story arcs and just an overall insight into the human condition are the roots of what make great literature, which have been built on by a succession of literary masters in the West since.

[Anonymous No.19336501]

>>19336301
Personally, I think the reason why ancient Epics are popular is because at some level, including maybe the subconscious, many people understand that these narratives encapsulate a primordial worldview. It's a return to the origins of our civilisations. I feel particularly strongly about that aspect of these works because I have read the Traditionalists. I should note, however, that in the case of the Illiad there is a suspicion of aesthetic distortion at the expense of the metaphysical value of the work. But it is still a really major work.
Also read the Gita.

[Anonymous No.19336560]

>>19336323
Homerchads just keep on winning

[Anonymous No.19336564]

Read Northrop Frye's discussion of Homer's language

In Words with Power he briefly talks about it in connection with biblical language

[Anonymous No.19336570]

>>19336351
You have to be at least 18 to post in this website

[Anonymous No.19336582]

>>19336570
296 reporting in

[Anonymous No.19336587]

>>19336343
>4chan retard uses retard meme phrase.
Retard. Pound clearly gives reasons why he thinks Homer is good.

[Anonymous No.19336594]

>>19336301
I’ve read the Ramayana. It’s a genuinely great work of literature, almost as good as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Iliad on the other hand is nothing more than an ancient capeshit soap opera

[Anonymous No.19336729]

>>19336594
>soap opera
Filtered.

[Anonymous No.19336736]

>>19336570
>HE'S REAL BECAUSE UMM..HE JUST IS OK!

[Anonymous No.19336756]

Homer in en*lish: soulless
Homer in GREEK: SOVLFUL
https://youtu.be/qI0mkt6Z3I0

[Anonymous No.19336782]

>>19336594
>Gilgamesh over Iliad
What’s your favorite flavor crayon?

[Anonymous No.19336826]

>>19336756
Why do bongs refuse to acknowledge the fact that translating ancient literature to their mutt language just sucks the passion out of it?

[Anonymous No.19336897]

>>19336756
based

[Anonymous No.19336971]

>>19336351
Soi.

[Anonymous No.19336982]

>>19336301
>The old world, speaking strictly, knew but one poet, and named him "Homeros." The Greek word "Poietes," which [138] the Latins—unable to translate it—reproduced as" Poeta," recurs most naïvely among the Provençals as "Trouvère," and suggested to our Middle-high Germans the term of "Finder," Gottfried von Strassburg calling the poet of Parzival a "Finder wilder Märe" (" finder of strange tales "). That "poietes "—of whom Plato averred that he had found for the Greeks their gods—would seem to have been preceded by the "Seer," much as the vision of that ecstatic shewed to Dante the way through Hell and Heaven. But the prodigy of the Greeks' sole poet—"the"—seems to have been that he was seer and poet in one; wherefore also they represented him as blind, like Tiresias. Whom the gods meant to see no semblance, but the very essence of the world, they sealed his eyes; that he might open to the sight of mortals that truth which, seated in Plato's figurative cavern with their backs turned outwards, they theretofore could see in nothing but the shadows cast by Show, This poet, as "seer," saw not the actual (das Wirkliche), but the true (das Wahrhaftige), sublime above all actuality; and the fact of his being able to relate it so faithfully to hearkening men that to them it seemed as clear and tangible as anything their hands had ever seized—this turned the Seer to a Poet.

>[...] Whoso should seek to demonstrate the art of Homer, would have as hard a task before him as if he undertook to shew the genesis of a human being by the laborious experiments of some Professor—supramundane, if you will—of Chemistry and Physics. Nevertheless the work of Homer is no unconscious fashioning of Nature's, but something infinitely higher; perhaps, the plainest manifestation of a godlike knowledge of all that lives. Yet Homer was no Artist, but rather all succeeding poets took their art from him, and therefore is he called "the Father of Poetry" (Dichtkunst). All Greek genius is nothing else than an artistic réchauffé (Nachdichtung) of Homer; for purpose of this réchauffé, was first discovered and matured that "Techne" which at last we have raised to a general principle [139] under name of the Art of Poetry, wrongheadedly including in it the "poietes" or "Finder der Märe."

CONT

[Anonymous No.19336986]

>>19336982
>The "ars poetica" of the Latins may rank as art, and from it be derived the whole artifice of verse-and-rhyme-making to our present day. If Dante once again was dowered with the Seer's eye—for he saw the Divine, though not the moving shapes of gods, as Homer—when we come to Ariosto things have faded to the fanciful refractions of Appearance; whereas Cervantes spied between the glintings of such arbitrary fancies the old-poetic world-soul's cloven quick, and sets that cleavage palpably before us in the lifelike actions of two figures seen in dream. And then, as if at Time's last stroke, a Scotsman's "second sight" grows clear to full clairvoyance of a world of history now lying lost behind us in forgotten documents, and its facts he tells to us as truthful fairy-tales told cheerily to listening children. But from that ars poetica, to which these rare ones owed no jot, has issued all that calls itself since Homer "Epic poetry"; and after him we have to seek the genuine epic fount in tales and sagas of the Folk alone, where we find it still entirely undisturbed by art.

>To be sure, what nowadays advances from the feuilleton to clothe the walls of circulating libraries, has had to do with neither art nor poesy. The actually-experienced has at no time been able to serve as stuff for epic narration; and "second sight" for the never-witnessed does not bestow itself on the first romancer who passes by. A critic once blamed the departed Gutzkow for depicting a poet's love-affairs with baronesses and countesses, "things of which he certainly could never have had any personal experience"; the author most indignantly replied by thinly-veiled allu sions to similar episodes that actually had happened to himself. On neither side could the unseemly folly of our novel-writing have been more cryingly exposed.—Goethe, on the other hand, proceeded in his "Wilhelm Meister" as the artist to whom the poet had refused his collaboration in discovery of a satisfactory ending; in his "Wahlverwandtschaften" the lyric elegist worked himself into a [140] seer of souls, but not as yet of living shapes. But what Cervantes had seen as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, dawned on Goethe's deep world-scrutiny as Faust and Mephistopheles; and these shapes beheld by his ownest eye now haunt the seeking artist as the riddle of an ineffable poet's-dream, which he thought, quite un-artistically but thoroughly sincerely, to solve in an impossible drama.

CONT

[Anonymous No.19336991]

>>19336986
>There may be something to learn from this, even for our members of the "German Poets'-grove" who feel neglected by their none too ardent publishers. For alas! one must say of their novels, their spirit's ripest fruits, that they have sprung from neither life nor tradition, but simply from theft and traduction. If neither the Greeks at their prime, nor any later great nation of culture, such as the Italians and Spaniards, could win from passing incidents the matter for an epic story, to you moderns this will presumably come a trifle harder: for the events they witnessed, at least were real phenomena; whilst ye, in all that rules, surrounds and dwells in you, can witness naught but masquerades tricked out with rags of culture from the wardrobe-shop and tags from the historical marine-store. The seer's eye for the ne'er-experienced the gods have always lent to none but their believers, as ye may ascertain from Homer or Dante. But ye have neither faith nor godliness.
- Wagner, On Poetry and Composition

[Anonymous No.19337629]

You're right. The divine comedy is the only truly entertaining epic poem. Later ones like Paterson and The cantos are also good. But everything before Dante kind of sucks let's be honest. The aenid is ok and the iliad is OK. I absolutely cannot stand the odyssey.

[Anonymous No.19337682]

>>19336501
kill yourself

[Anonymous No.19337707]

>>19337682
No thanks. Cope and seethe.

[Anonymous No.19337729]

>>19336351
There's no evidence [ancient personality] existed no.1293821938

[Anonymous No.19337750]

>>19336382
shut the fuck up bloom fanboy