Volume I contains Aetia, Iambi, and lyric poems Volume II, Hecale, Hymns, and Epigrams and Volume III, miscellaneous epics and elegies, other fragments, and testimonia, together with concordances and a general index. Trypanis (1954, 1958), presents all that currently survives of and about Callimachus and his works, including the ancient commentaries ( Diegeseis) and scholia. This edition, which replaces the earlier Loeb editions by A. The “Callimachean” style, combining learning, elegance, and innovation and prizing brevity, clarity, lightness, and charm, served as an important model for later poets, not least at Rome for Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the elegists, among others. 235 BC), a proud and well-born native of Cyrene in Libya, came as a young man to the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, where he composed poetry for the royal family helped establish the Library and Museum as a world center of literature, science, and scholarship and wrote an estimated 800 volumes of poetry and prose on an astounding variety of subjects, including the Pinakes, a descriptive bibliography of the Library’s holdings in 120 volumes.Ĭallimachus’ vast learning richly informs his poetry, which ranges broadly and reworks the language and generic properties of his predecessors in inventive, refined, and expressive ways. Now with enhanced navigation »Ĭallimachus (ca. Being a separate entity, far from denigrating lyrics, allows us to measure them on their own terms.The digital Loeb Classical Library extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. Kevin Young, writing in Bookforum’s music issue, is right when he suggests that such an expansion of the term “risks reducing poetry to little more than a free-floating feeling.” Prose, though it can also be poetic, isn’t poetry, and no one complains about that. But while some lyricists, notably many in hip-hop, are remarkably poetic, it seems pointless-and even harmful-to insist on lyrics as poetry. (Appropriately: the word poetry is derived from the Greek verb “poiein,” meaning “to make.”) So to deny the label to song lyrics does seem like a value judgment. Most of us casually use the term “poetry” to refer to almost anything we consider beautifully made, from a cake to a sunset to a well-executed double Salchow. It is clear which of these was originally written to music, and not only because of the lack of rhyme in “21.” Take, for example, the opening lines of “Visions of Johanna,” by Bob Dylan, who has long been acclaimed as one of our most poetic songwriters:ĭeath silenced her pool the day she died hovered over her little toy dogs but left no trace of itself at her funeral Even for those of us who are more literary-minded, seeing lyrics written on a page often diminishes whatever pleasure they gave when embedded in the context of a song. And yes, to some extent, the more we define what is poetry and what it isn’t, the more of an uncommon, niche experience it becomes.īut ask a musician what he or she first hear in a song and the answer is never the words. The first poems may well have been lyrics themselves. And why not? Poetry and music have a long history together, from Greek rhapsodes to medieval troubadours. Song lyrics are one of our most common encounters with words, and it would be lovely to think that everyone attached to an iPod was in the process of digesting a poem. At the Smart Set, Kristen Hoggatt took issue with this dismissal of lyrics, writing that Collins is “pushing poetry to the elite fringe.”
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