This poem pushes back the earliest appearance of stressed poetry by at least 300 years,” he said. “It has this sort of magnetic rhythm to it, four beats to the bar, a stress on the first beat, and weaker stress on the third beat, which is rock’n’roll and pop music as well.”
The theme of the poem “also feels preternaturally modern”, said Whitmarsh, comparing it to the Sex Pistols line: “We’re pretty a-pretty vacant / And we don’t care.” The poem reads: “Λέγουσιν They say / ἃ θέλουσιν What they like / λεγέτωσαν Let them say it / οὐ μέλι μοι I don’t care / σὺ φίλι με Go on, love me / συνφέρι σοι It does you good.”
“It’s the idea of not caring – this strident assertion of your individuality in a world that’s demanding things of you,” Whitmarsh said.
“We’ve known for a long time that there was popular poetry in ancient Greek, but a lot of what survives takes a similar form to traditional high poetics. This poem, on the other hand, points to a distinct and thriving culture, primarily oral, which fortunately for us in this case also found its way on to a number of gemstones,” said Whitmarsh.
“You didn’t need specialist poets to create this kind of musicalised language, and the diction is very simple, so this was clearly a democratising form of literature. We’re getting an exciting glimpse of a form of oral pop culture that lay under the surface of classical culture.”
Whitmarsh believes the verse, with its lines of four syllables, with a strong accent on the first and a weaker on the third, could represent a “missing link” between the lost world of ancient Mediterranean oral poetry and song, and the more modern forms that we know today. It is, he says, so far unparalleled in the classical world...
“The reason no one has thought about it as a poem before is because it’s not catalogued alongside works of literature, it’s catalogued as an inscription. We’ve got tens of thousands of inscriptions from antiquity, and I just think people weren’t looking for it.” — the guardian - classics - I don't care
Why should you read James Joyce's "Ulysses"? - Sam Slote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7FobPxu27M — Corvus
James Joyce's “Ulysses” is widely considered to be both a literary masterpiece and one of the hardest works of literature to read. It inspires such devotion that once a year, thousands of people all over the world dress up like the characters, take to the streets, and read the book aloud. So what is it about this novel that inspires so many people? Sam Slote uncovers the allure of this epic tome.
View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-should... — Sam Slote - TED-Ed animation
He painted portraits,” wrote Vincent van Gogh of Hals in 1888, “nothing nothing nothing but that!” He goes on in his letter to the French artist Émile Bernard to detail the kind of portraits his compatriot produced: “Portraits of soldiers, gatherings of officers, portraits of magistrates assembled for the business of the republic, portraits of matrons with pink or yellow skin, wearing white bonnets … he painted the tipsy drinker, the old fishwife full of a witch’s mirth, the beautiful Gypsy whore, babies in swaddling clothes, the gallant, bon vivant gentleman …”
Simplicity appealed to Van Gogh. So he responded with feeling to the straightforwardness of Hals. It was an enthusiasm he shared with the radical French artists Courbet and Manet, who painted copies of works by Hals...
Courbet was drawn to Hals’s portrait of an outsider but he didn’t know how radical this painting really was. The work he copied was thought in the 19th century to be an unknown woman or even a “tronie”, a kind of fictional portrait sometimes created as an experiment by Dutch artists. But the name Malle Babbe – “Mad Babs” – is written on it.
Haarlem’s town archives reveal this was probably a real woman, named Barbara Claes, who was a patient in the local hospital for mental illness where one of Hals’s sons is also known to have lived. Courbet and Van Gogh felt her reality without knowing this. Malle Babbe is clearly “the old fishwife full of a witch’s mirth” Van Gogh describes....
...another painting that puts Hals at the very forefront of French modern art. La Bohémienne, or The Gipsy Girl, is Paris’s more disreputable Laughing Cavalier. This painting of a young woman in coarsely made, loosely painted clothes that mainly serve to set off her breasts as she grins broadly was left to the Louvre by Louis La Caze in 1869.
The driving force of French avant garde culture was reality. To see and acknowledge the actual world around them in all its filth and glory drove writers and artists alike.
...Hals has a couple of virtues Rembrandt doesn’t. He can make you laugh. And that lightness is the most modern thing about him of all, as we glance at his fast brushstrokes and catch an amused eye looking back. — The Guardian : Van Gogh’s hero: there’s more to Frans Hals than The Laughing Cavalier
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