Style:
Meter Simile Flashbacks Ring Composition
Meter:
Greek poetry does not rhyme, although it relies on alliteration and assonance. With this aspect of oral tradition in mind, how do we alter our modern sensibilities as we read Homer's Iliad?
Abrams finds its derivitive from the Greek "epitheton," signifying something added. As a term in criticism, it denotes an adjective or adjectival phrase used to define the special quality of a person or thing. (Keats' "silver snarling trumpets"). The term is also applied to an identifying phrase that stands in place of a noun (Pope's "the glittering forfex) is a heroic act in The Rape of the Lock). Homeric epithets are adjectival terms, usually a compound of two words, like those which Homer used as formulas in referring to someone or something: "fleet-footed Achilles," "bolt-hurling Zeus," "the wine-dark sea." Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses parodied the formula in his reference to "the snot-green sea." We often use fixed, or conventional epithets in identifying historical or literary figures: Charles the Great, Patient Griselda.
NB: King Agamemnon's epithet, "lord of men" recurs sixty times throughout the twenty four books. Only five times is it missing from the mentioning of his name. The Greek, anax andron, echoes the name, Agamemnon. Thus, so much is lost in translation. (In one of his laconic moments during an answer and question period of a public lecture, Robert Frost once defined poetry as the thing that is lost in translation.)
Simile:
Ring Composition:
Flashbacks:
Content for the above was copied and gleaned from a great teaching resourse: Poetry for Students, Volumes 1-12. Comp. and Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Michigan: Gale Group, 1999.