Odes

This landmark book explores the ways in which the Greco-Roman tradition has shaped modern European and American literature.

From Achilles's heel to the sword of Damocles, Western culture teems with allusions from the rich heritage of classical literature, and this new edition of The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, the first updating since Sir Paul Harvey's original edition of 1937, provides the key to these works and the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations that produced them. Substantially revising the first edition, this volume condenses the findings of the most recent scholarship into highly readable prose and supplies a wealth of background information not found in Harvey's Companion. Indispensable to those studying classical literature in depth, the book will be equally accessible to the non-specialist. All Greek is transliterated, with translations given for all quotations from Greek and Latin. The main focus of the Companion remains the lives and works of the principal authors. Biographical entries offer the essential facts and sift the conjectural evidence, while entries on the major works include discussions of the philosophical dialogues and political speeches and plot summaries of the epic poems and plays. The various literary forms--epic, comedy, tragedy, rhetorical writing--are covered in depth, supplemented by articles on the origins of the Greek and Latin alphabets and languages. The Companion also puts this literature into its societal and historical contexts, including many articles on political, social, and artistic achievements. We learn, for example, about the political climate that produced the great speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero. Orators, statesmen, and generals stalk the pages, and major battles and conquests from the time of Alexander to the fall of Rome are summarized. Articles on contemporary social mores and religious beliefs help explain literary references, while the glories of philosophy, science, and art are celebrated from Cynics to Stoics, astronomy to water-clocks, and flute competitions to vase painting. Helpful maps supplement geographical entries, a chronological table provides an overview of the main historical and literary events, and a systematic set of cross-references links the entries. The breadth and accuracy of this volume will surely make it the standard reference book of its kind for years to come.

James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present.

While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the inaccessibility of the past ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the excess of melancholia ("Ode on Melancholy"), and the beneficence of nature ("To Autumn") become culturally coded as "female", and he demonstrates how they confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms. This original study does much to illuminate what Keats's,most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.