Sublimity is the image of greatness of soul. The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. Skill in invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition, whereas Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays […]
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Tolstoy on Shakespeare
[Posted to commemorate the 185th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s birthday] Tolstoy was a bona fide iconoclast, who was not afraid to think and speak for himself, and did so with the force of reason and conviction, as is evident in his critical essay on Shakespeare. Comparing Shakespeare with Homer However distant Homer is from us, we can, without the slightest effort, transport ourselves into the life he describes,…because he believes […]
Read more“Homeric Hymns” by Anonymous
The Art of the Lyre “Whoso with wit and wisdom enquires of it cunningly, him it teaches through its sound all manner of things that delight the mind, being easily played with gentle familiarities, for it abhors toilsome drudgery; but whoso in ignorance enquires of it violently, to him it chatters mere vanity and foolishness.” The Contest of Homer and Hesiod Hesiod: ‘Homer, son of Meles, if indeed the Muses, […]
Read more“Iliad” by Homer
Great War Epic Imagine camping on a beach on a start-lit night, and as you’re sitting around the camp fire, Homer tells a story of a great war that happened on the very same shore a long, long time ago. There were warriors as numerous as the stars in the heaven and grains of sand on the beach, but the majority of them were doomed to die because of the […]
Read more“The Odyssey” by Homer
An epic story of the hero Odysseus’ journey home from war against all odds. He endured many hardships and troubles, perils on the sea, on the land, man-eating monsters and giants, nymphs and witches, the Olympian gods who were angry with him, and above all, he had to overcome the folly and greed of his own gluttonous companions who perished because of their own madness, and the murderous men in […]
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