/lit/ - Literature

I am Greek

>>10090920

I'm sorry

>W. H. Auden
They had a democracy while you were swinging on trees

>>10090870
>There is no single Greek literary work of art as great as The Divine Comedy; there is no extant series of works by a single Greek literary artist as impressive as the complete plays of Shakespeare
correct

>>10090946
/thread

Auden is a Pictish name. His ancestors were squatting in caves gnawing on human bones while Greeks were building western civilization.

>>10090946
>>10090963

And the Egyptians had built the Pyramids before you even thought to start fucking other men.

>>10090979
>greeks
>made some of the most impressive monuments in human history that still baffle the modern man in their complexity and artistic value
>egyptians
>"uh, we made like a stone pyramid or smth idk"
yeah, totally comparable

>>10090870
the fact that he picked that over paradise lost shows he likes pulp more than actual depth in writing

>>10090870
An estimated 90% of ancient Greek works have been lost. Mostly via library burnings by both Christian and Muslim fanatacists.

>>10090920
pay detbs

>>10091680
Burning pagan "art" is not a crime.

>>10091716
neck yourself, uncultured mongrel

>>10091680

Which Christain burning are you referencing?

>>10091718

Piss your pants, slithering bush

>>10091716
given your ideas, if you were born in the Middle East you would make a great ISIL recruit

>>10090946
What does that prove? Many countries were democracies while Auden was swinging from trees.

>>10093525
...assuming he ever swung from trees, of course.

>>10090870
>The Divine Comedy
This is the first classic I'm having a hard time with tbph. It doesn't do much for me. Just one damned soul after another.

>the seventy-five-odd years of Athenian drama, between the first tragedies of Aeschylus and the last comedy of Aristophanes are surpassed by the hundred and twenty-five years, between Gluck's Orpheus and Verdi's Otello

>>10090870
it's almost as if Dante and Shakespeare had millennia of literary tradition from myriad civilizations to draw upon

>>10094007
this

>>10094007
>millennia of literary tradition from myriad civilizations
Yet they only drew from Ancient Greek and Roman sources. hmm

>>10093533
same, im not getting it, will re-read after some secondary texts and hope i get something from it.

>>10090920
fuck kαζαντζαkη

>>10094944
>Hamlet
>Richard III
>Macbeth
I could go on

>>10094944
Not even true

In his lecture What is a Classic, Eliot pointed out that a society needs to have a common, matured language and a mature sensibility and culture for one of its geniuses to produce a classic. He singles out Virgil as the classic writer par excellence because Rome had the tradition of the Greeks to react to, the recent fall of its own republic and rise of its empire to meditate on, and he had a fully mature idiom to both use to its fullest and stretch out beyond the confines of.

He points out Dante as being perhaps closest to Virgil, Shakespeare as a great genius with a mature sensibility but not a mature idiom to flex (in fact, he was at the cutting edge of creating English), and poets such as Milton as usuibg a mature idiom but living in a immature, partly decadent society.

Of course, by his weird definition of a classic, the Greeks don't qualify. But I think he's on to something.