Month: March 2007 Page 1 of 3

Notwithstanding the Veneration due, and paid to Homer, it is very strange, yet true, that among the most learn’d, and the greatest Admirers of Antiquity, there is scarce to be found, who ever read the Iliad, with that Eagerness and Rapture, which a Woman feels when she reads the Novel of Zaida¹; and as to the common Mass of Readers, less conversant with letters, but not perhaps endow’d with a less Share of Judgment and Wit, few have been able to go through the whole Iliad, without struggling against a secret Dislike, and some have thrown it aside after the fourth or fifth Book. How does it come to pass, that Homer has so many Admirers and so few Readers? And is at the same Time worshipp’d and neglected? (Voltaire, An Essay on Epick Poetry, 48-49)

The more things change, the more they stay the same…there were fake bibliophiles even back in the 18th century! (I typed that from a fascimile, thus the weird spellings and capitalization. I could’ve modernized it, but why? But I did use a regular “s” everytime he had an “s” that looks like an “f”. That’s the bad thing about fascimile versions.) Anyway. I found that amusing. I can just see some 18th-century schoolboy hurling his Homer across the room.

¹ Apparently a popular novel of the time. I found one Zaida written by Augustus von Kotzebue, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the same, since this essay was published in 1727, and Kotzebue wasn’t born until, like 1760. In any case, novels were new at the time and generally held in contempt and considered only suitable for flighty women, which is the import of what he’s saying here.

I feel for A.D. Harvey and the research he put into writing the Neo-classical vs. Romantic section of this book Literature and History, especially in hunting down and examining the hundreds of epics written according to the Neo-classical guidelines in the late-18th, early-19th century, hoping to come up with something to rival the ancient Greeks.

I have hunted the early nineteenth-century epic through bibliographies and literary journals, ordering up hundred weights of volumes, some handsome quartos in crumbling calf, others cheap editions with mildewed uncut pages, rare, sometimes unique survivors of the piled-up brand-new volumes which once went forth from the warehouse with the pride of the epic poet and have been long since almost all consumed by the various destructiveness and impatiences of the world; I have turned page after page insistently different yet endlessly the same, like tombstones in a forgotten war cemetery; I have searched through the obscuring medium of French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Danish, Swedish and Dutch for a glimmer of hitherto unacknowledged genius, a unique sensibility attempting to liberate itself from the marble blocks of verse, a voice expressing a perception of something that needed to be preserved; and sometimes I have thought that all I was achieving with my growing lists of titles was that for the first time statistical proof was being given of how many boring people there were in the early nineteenth-century (137-138).

It’s rare that a scholarly volume will make me laugh out loud, but that did. Oh, those Neo-classicists and their sameness-inducing rule-bounded-ness.

In other news, I burned my brownies. :( Note to self: when the timer goes off, TAKE THE FOOD OUT. *facepalm*