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Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. 376. ISBN 0-691- 07485-2. USD45.00.
This is an important and valuable book that with learning and thoughtful attention re-imagines the story of how the Greeks thought about poetry. Ford convincingly argues that because archaic poetry was socially located in particular occasions, comments about song in the archaic period should not be read as if poetry were already an independent field of study and as if particular evaluations always implied poetic norms. Defining criticism as praise or blame of performance, he argues that Xenophanes' poetic criticisms of poetry about the gods, for example, should not be isolated as philosophical but belongs with his other injunctions about symposiastic behaviour: singing good songs belongs with not becoming excessively drunk or holding a symposium in a dirty room. Similarly Ford stresses that poets like Simonides and Pindar compare their products to works of art because they are claiming superiority for their art as a way of spreading fame. Because archaic poetry is tightly bound to immediate social and competitive needs, so is criticism. Indeed, in praising or blaming the poetic performance, the critic is engaging in a social performance of his own that is itself potentially subject to praise and blame. Criticism is therefore profoundly rhetorical and social and needs to be understood as practice. Allegorical interpretation, for example, unites critic and audience as an elite group. By the fourth century, however, poetry has been separated from its original performance contexts and become available as an object of discussion and debate for itself; criticism in a modern sense is the result. The book defines this transformation and seeks to understand how it came about. It is thus right in the centre of recent work on archaic poetry with its emphasis on performance and particular occasions, but its application of such thought to poetics is original. Throughout the book is clear, thorough, lively and fair in its engagements with earlier work on the topic, and these qualities make it unusually enjoyable to read.
Ford gives special importance to literacy in transforming the understanding of poetry; as a written text, the song could have left its performance...