Abstract
What is the relationship between poetry and scholarship? What can poetry add to the sum of knowledge that scholarship might not? Conceived as a coda to my 2013 study, Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry, “The Library versus The Lyre” applies the same methods of critical discussion of, and commentary on, my practice as a poet and classical translator to my latest collection, The Paths of Survival (2017). This collection comprises a poetic sequence which moves backwards in time from the present-day to antiquity as it explores the fragility of the written word; how it is destroyed and how it can endure, often in surprising ways, against all odds. In particular, it focuses on the ten tiny scraps of Aeschylus’s play Myrmidons all that now remains of his tragic masterpiece written in the fifth century BCE— commencing with a tiny scrap preserved in the Sackler Library, Oxford and concluding with the Athenian tragedian himself revising his manuscript on his deathbed in Sicily in 456 BCE. Of all my collections, The Paths of Survival offers the most scholarly concerns, raising most questions about the correlations and disruptions between the poetic and the academic. “The Library versus The Lyre” examines this sometimes distrustful, often productive, relationship between the two fields as it looks forward to a new, mutually sympathetic synthesis. As it concludes: “...without scholarship Myrmidons would be lost. And without poetry it would never have been written.”
Highlights
Given a line After a 2017 reading at the Ioannou Centre in Oxford, organised by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), I was asked by an academic in the audience why I had chosen to write my new collection, The Paths of Survival, as poetry rather than scholarship
At first glance the collection might appear to have an overtly scholarly movement, tracing the scattered fragments of Aeschylus’s lost tragedy Myrmidons backwards in time, from a tiny scrap preserved in the Sackler Library, Oxford, through archaeologists, scholars, editors, manuscript hunters, anthologists and scribes right back to the Athenian tragedian himself revising his manuscript on his deathbed in Sicily in 456 BCE
Forming the first part of Aeschylus’s lost trilogy, the Achilleis, the play had been notorious throughout antiquity, and beyond, for the way in which it portrayed the homoerotic relationship between the Greek warrior prince Achilles and his comrade Patroclus, an element which is not explicit in Homer’s version of the myth in the Iliad as Pantelis Michelakis points out, Aeschylus’s account soon became prevalent in fifth century Athens [47]
Summary
Given a line After a 2017 reading at the Ioannou Centre in Oxford, organised by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), I was asked by an academic in the audience why I had chosen to write my new collection, The Paths of Survival, as poetry rather than scholarship.
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