The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry by W. R. Johnson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 355 vulnerability of the Greek poleis in the face of the threat from Macedon, but the book is nonetheless dotted with dark hints about an ill-defined decline, and it is no coincidence that the concluding chapter has many references to the work of Mosse, a firm believer in this putative falling off from the higher tone of political life in the fifth century. Still, Lintott's work provides close and comprehensive examination from a broad perspective of an important phenomenon. It is of the greatest value to both undergraduate and graduate students, and appreciation for the very ample documentation Lintott provides in the footnotes at the end of each chapter may compensate scholars for any irritation occasioned by Lintott's tendency to draw out familiar tales to untoward length. SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY JENNIFER TOLBERT ROBERTS W. R. JOHNSON. The Idea of L};'ric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982. Pp. xii + 214. Cloth, U.S. $22.50. Paper, U.S. $7.95. ISBN 0-520-04462-2 (Cloth), 0-520-04821-0 (Paper). This book is one of a new series, "Eidos: Studies in Classical Kinds", the General Editor of which is Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. Johnson's task, the definition of lyric poetry, is no easy one, and the decision, whether his or the General Editor's, to use translations only for the Greek and Latin poems imposes further difficulty: the author must confine his attention to the sense, tone and imagery of the poems, neglecting sounds and syntax; metre receives scant notice and no explanation. Some would maintain that to talk only of the content of lyric poetry is nonsensical, but Johnson is not one of them, and he undertakes his task with confidence and enthusiasm. Johnson's three categories of lyric are (1) the I/You poem, "in which the poet addresses or pretends to address his thoughts and feelings to another person"; the "You" may be actual or fictional, singular or plural; (2) what Eliot called the meditative poem, "in 356 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS which the poet talks to himself or to no one in particular or, sometimes, calls on, apostrophizes, inanimate or non-human entities, abstractions, or the dead"; (3) "the poem cast as a dialogue, dramatic monologue, or straight narrative, in which the poet disappears entirely". According to Johnson's analysis, Greek and Latin poets usually composed the first type, but since the 17th century it has gradually been replaced by the second and third; exceptions in the present century include Housman, Hardy, later Yeats and, more recently, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. The Greek lyric poet, as exemplified by Archilochus, Sappho, Anacreon, Simonides and Pindar, is always concerned with discourse, with describing the nature of the inner passions and with deliberating on their nature and meaning; he offers paradigms or patterns for praise or blame, and he educates his hearer. The standard for monody was set by Sappho, who "knew how to imagine and to order emotion because she knew how to imagine and to order lyrical ~". In choral poetry Simonides, a representative of the new rationalism, asks questions about men and gods and answers through dialectic; Pindar, inventor of the vatic personality, goes back to the old legends and renews them. The fourth-century philosophers did not kill lyric poetry by their strictures: scholars like Aristophanes of Byzantium isolated the standard patterns, and Callimachus and the others wrote a pure and perfect poetry, literary lyric, without power or commitment; despair takes over in Meleager and in the "later" Catullus (~., the author of the long poems and elegiacs), who displays a new inwardness. Horace found a distinctive manner by modelling himself on the Greeks, the dominating voice being that of Simonides, and he finished by inventing spiritual autobiography in the Epistles. Johnson's fifth chapter, subtitled "Some Lyric Mongrels and Lyric Monologue", considers briefly the choral and solo lyric of Greek and Roman tragedy and the development of lyric monologue in Euripides, Catullus' long poems, Virgil's Eclogues and ultimately the earlier poems of Eliot, The Waste Land above all. Choral lyric, in which the poet represents the community and...