[Milton-L] RE: Dennis Danielson's quiet voice

[Mario DiCesare]

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you Tony Demarest and Carroll Cox for your eloquent and vigorous statements 
about Homer. I yield to no one in my love of his poetry and I have, in my cranky 
retirement, occasionally found time to read even some of the Greek text again, after 
more than fifty years. The 24th book of the "Iliad" is incomparable, a work beyond 
praise, beyond comment, simply to be read and and pondered and re-read and pondered.

However, I would enter a small demurral to Tony's fine statement. A long time ago, 
my friend and colleague John Gardner bullied me into paying close attention to 
"Gilgamesh," first composed a millennium and a half before Homer. "Rage, love, and 
home" are all there, memorably and almost (not quite) incomparably.

None of this takes away from Milton or, for that matter, from Vergil. But why should 
anything in one poet or poem take away from any other?

Cheers,

Mario A. DiCesare




Tony Demarest wrote:
> Homer will never be forgotten because he created memory- a memory of before the Fall,
  before the need to justify the ways of God(s) to man, indeed, before any other 
writer/thinker
discovered the ideas of rage, love, and home.
> 
> Tony
> ----------------------------------------
>> Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 15:54:11 -0500
>> From: cbcox at ilstu.edu
>> To: milton-l at lists.richmond.edu
>> Subject: Re: [Milton-L] RE: Dennis Danielson's quiet voice
>>
>>
>>
>> "Watt, James" wrote:
>>>  Milton's critics will be read when Homer has been forgotten.
>> That reading and admiring Milton can lead to such incredibly ignorant
>> statements as this is the strongest possible negative judgment of
>> Milton. But Milton stands above such petty critics with their utter
>> inability to grasp Homer. The Iliad, in particular the last two books,
>> even in translation, tower over anything else ever written in the west.
>>
>> In that poem, humanity discovers its humanity, snd the tragic meaning of
>> that humanity. Paradise Lost, as wonderful as it is, stands deep in the
>> shadow of Homer.
>>
>> Carrol
>>