Greek Lyric Poetry

"The corpus of Greek lyric holds a twofold attraction. It provides glimpses of the song culture of early Greece in which lyric performance had a central place, and it presents us with some captivating and memorable poetry which has been admired since antiquity. This edition gathers poems by seven of the nine canonical lyricists (Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides), as well as a number of carmina popularia and carmina convivalia and passages from Timotheus' Persians. Both longer and shorter pieces are included. The Introduction discusses major issues in the study of Greek lyric including genre, performance and transmission. The commentary is literary in emphasis but also treats questions of syntax, textual reconstruction, metre and dialect. The volume will be of interest to higher-level undergraduates and graduate students as well as to scholars"-- "'Lyric' in contemporary literary criticism is a term as elusive as it is suggestive. It exists both as an adjective, expressing a poetic quality, and as a noun denoting a poetic mode, and both are notoriously difficult to define. It is this protean quality that has allowed 'lyric' to become a powerful creative stimulus for both poets and theorists. A foundational period for today's sense of 'lyric' was the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century"--