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Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of \"imitation\" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls \"world-reflecting\" and \"world-simulating\" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.

By \"literary criticism\" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word \"social\" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should--if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from. Andrew Ford offers a new understanding of the development of criticism, demonstrating that its roots stretch back long before the sophists to public commentary on the performance of songs and poems in the preliterary era of ancient Greece. He pinpoints when and how, later in the Greek tradition than is usually assumed, poetry was studied as a discipline with its own principles and methods. The Origins of Criticism complements the usual, history-of-ideas approach to the topic precisely by treating criticism as a social as well as a theoretical activity. With unprecedented and penetrating detail, Ford considers varying scholarly interpretations of the key texts discussed. Examining Greek discussions of poetry from the late sixth century B.C. through the rise of poetics in the late fourth, he asks when we first can recognize anything like the modern notions of literature as imaginative writing and of literary criticism as a special knowledge of such writing.

Arion's Lyreexamines how Hellenistic poetic culture adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed Archaic Greek lyric through a complex process of textual, cultural, and creative reception. Looking at the ways in which the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides was preserved, edited, and read by Hellenistic scholars and poets, the book shows that Archaic poets often look very different in the new social, cultural, and political setting of Hellenistic Alexandria. For example, the Alexandrian Sappho evolves from the singer of Archaic Lesbos but has distinct associations and contexts, from Ptolemaic politics and Macedonian queens to the new phenomenon of the poetry book and an Alexandrian scholarship intent on preservation and codification. A study of Hellenistic poetic culture and an interpretation of some of the Archaic poets it so lovingly preserved,Arion's Lyreis also an examination of how one poetic culture reads another--and how modern readings of ancient poetry are filtered and shaped by earlier readings.

The article deals with versified works of Viktor Dyk from the pre-war period (1897–1914) written in iambic pentameter. It analyses the relationship between the texts’ genre (lyric, satire, drama) and their rhythmic features (frequencies of stressing the line-initial and line-final syllables, frequencies of enjambment). The article concludes that Dyk’s lyric poems as well as his drama tend to employ features generally perceived as more literary compared to his satire.

The article deals with versified works of Viktor Dyk from the pre-war period (1897–1914) written in iambic pentameter. It analyses the relationship between the texts’ genre (lyric, satire, drama) and their rhythmic features (frequencies of stressing the line-initial and line-final syllables, frequencies of enjambment). The article concludes that Dyk’s lyric poems as well as his drama tend to employ features generally perceived as more literary compared to his satire.

In his witty introduction to modern poetry,Beautiful & Pointless, David Orr notes that “poetry” is one of the most popular Internet search terms. He also comments that many people pair, in their searches, the word “poetry” and the word “love.” If you Google “I love poetry” you’ll get enormously more hits than if you Google “I love politics,” “I love travel,” or “I love interior decorating.” We are interested in, or else are bored by, politics (or travel, or interior decorating); but we love poetry. When we turn against poetry we tend to say, not that we hate it,

Since Homer and perhaps much earlier, before written poetry, the dactylic meter has rolled through Western literature like a “polyphlosboiou thalassa” (many-sounding sea), to use a phrase of Homer’s. The ancient dactylic poems have been a touchstone for poets for centuries, yet few have attempted the meter in English. Rarer in English poetry than the trochee or anapest, the dactyl is the furthest common metrical foot from the familiar iamb. Because of this as well as its beauty, to write in dactyls can be a liberating, if challenging, experience for the contemporary poet. A triple instead of a double foot,

In the previous chapters we surveyed notions of the temporal and the spatial as well as of utterance and its inhibition as means to adjudicate the interaction between Catullus and Horace. We now turn from abstract to concrete, as in separate chapters we watch two figures who help focus our attention on a series of interconnected poems by each writer. The first is Helen of Troy. Three adjacent odes in the first book ofCarmina, 15–17, however diverse their subject matter in appearance, have important elements in common.¹ The clearest unifying factor is their distinctive associations with Helen. The

Robert Bridges’s experimental and dynamic poetic forms (and his discussions of these forms) were central to the changing perception of English meter from the late Victorian to the postwar period. Bridges’s role in the prosody wars, in particular, complicates the accepted narrative of the rise of free verse, and shows how the consolidated concept of traditional meters was challenged not only from the modernist avant-garde but also from poets who had been expanding the concept of English meter throughout the late nineteenth century. The dynamism of meter in English and Bridges’s deep commitment, not unlike that of Ezra Pound’s, to