JACT REVIEWPARROTS, POETS, PHILOSOPHERS AND GOOD ADVICE
SERIES 2, NUMBER 27
SUMMER 2000
ISSN 0268-0181
Raymond Geuss, Hearing Eye, 1999, pbk, £6, ISBN 1870841638
It is not every day that one is asked to review a book by the author of a seminal work (The Idea of a Critical Theory), nor is it every day that one is asked to review a series of didactic poems. G, philosophy lecturer and poet, has attempted to produce 'contemporary equivalents' of the likes of Plato, Euripides, Lucretius and Sappho (although he probably wisely restricts his poems to the short variety).
The original texts are helpfully placed alongside to allow comparison with G's own 'instructional poems', a genre he considers to be ready for revival, having 'fallen into desuetude during the past 200 years'. For G sees himself continuing a long tradition, regarding the Classical works as antecedents, and he deals with many of the themes familiar from the genre, 'wine, hot baths, sex', personal hygiene and appearance, 'an aged codger with flaccid todger', eating, drinking, and so on.
Some very familiar names are among those antecedents, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, with some interesting versions of very familiar verses. However, since he is using a wide range of sources as his starting points, G is able to write on almost any topic, from an interesting series on Ariadne to poems such as 'Clytemnestra on Agamemnon' (working from Aeschylus) or 'Achilles to Patroclus'. At the same time, that very range makes this collection more difficult for classicists who have yet to read the likes of Damocharis, Leonidas of Tarentum and Tymnes, not to mention various graffiti from Pompeii and a number of epitaphs. That is not to say that this collection could not stand on its own, but almost all of the poems either are, or could be, set in the classical world, and it is certainly possible to gain a deeper appreciation of the modern version with a good understanding of the original. (Even the Greek and Latin originals only get one so far!)
Quite how all these verses can be considered 'instructional' is hard to say, but G deserves credit for attempting to follow in some very famous footsteps and for producing a most interesting, wide-ranging collection, including a number of neat versions of both the rude and the melancholy. Fans of didactic excepted, it is probably better suited to someone reading for pleasure than instruction, being often more epigrammatic than didactic, with the more philosophical poems, perhaps unsuprisingly, where he seems to be at his best.
TIM WHEELER
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