The First Poets

European poetry takes its bearings from a brilliant constellation of classical Greek and Latin poets and Biblical writers whose lives (where they are known as legend or fact) and work (as it survives) continue to inform our writing and reading, even as the original languages, once central to a humane education, fall into disuse. The poets’ stories, their loves, lusts and longings, the forms they devise, their rhetorical strategies, are vital in urgent ways, so that Ted Hughes finds new life through Ovid, Christopher Logue through Homer, Les Murray through Hesiod, Ezra Pound through Propertius, Seamus Heaney through Dante, and a host of writers through Horace, Catallus, Sappho and others. In this book Michael Schmidt writes about the twenty classical poets who have had most influence. The obvious ones – Homer, David, Dante, Virgil – gain from the presence of important lesser-known writers including for instance the lyricist Anacreon, Theocritus the father of pastoral, and Boethius who haunted the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Where the lives are verifiable they are fascinating – and the miracle that these people became writers and that their work survives. Where true lives are shrouded in mystery, later writers and readers provide narratives of their own. We know more about Homer than Homer could ever know about himself. The classics have been alive for more than a millennium in our literature. The object of this book is to entertain, inform and create an awareness of necessary presences: these are poets out of whom our imaginations, like our literatures, are woven.