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Ford (classics, Princeton U.) addresses the perennial questions of what poetry is, how it came to be, and what it is for. Focusing on the critical moment in Western literature when the heroic tales of the Greek oral tradition began to be preserved in writing, he examines these questions in the light of Homeric poetry. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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What did Homer think he was doing? In a strikingly original approach to the question, Ford derives the Homeric theory of poetry and of the poet's office from the Homeric poems themselves. In the first chapter, on genre, Ford argues that the Homeric epics and other archaic poems belong to a subclass of poetry whose function was to transmit the past accurately but impersonally, and that the poet was hence a kind of prophet or seer of the past. The second chapter defines the epic poem as a portion of a whole truth about the past whose unity only the Muses could comprehend completely, and to which they vouchsafe the bard a limited access. In Chap. 3 Ford addresses the poet's sense of self, developed historically most probably in the context of public performances and contests, and formulated as the most vivid re-presentation of the tradition. Chap. 4 treats the relationship between the ephemeral process of song and the idea of the poetic text as a permanent memorial to the past, and Chap. 5 examines the conception of poetry as "divine singing." Ford's Homer is an ingenious and subtle inquiry into ancient poetics, innovative in conception, informed but not burdened by exhaustive scholarship, and executed in an accessible and elegant style. It is a mini-masterpiece that both the scholar and the informed general reader will devour with pleasure and profit. M. A. Katz; Wesleyan University