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Classical World 99.2 (2006) 190-192



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Mark W. Edwards. Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 191. $39.95. ISBN 0-691-08666-4.

I should start this review of Mark Edwards' book, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry,by reporting that I was his student many years ago and have found great pleasure "hearing" once again my teacher's voice, as I read his book. For this is Edwards' goal in the book, which is based on his Martin Lectures at Oberlin in 1998: to offer a model of how to teach Greek and Latin poetry to students who are still struggling with the languages and spend much of their time in class [End Page 190] "translating." And beyond this stated goal there is an implicit mission in Edwards' work to refocus the attention of classicists onto the words and sounds of poetry and to explore its spoken characteristics.

Edwards moves patiently and meticulously through passages of poetry, teaching the reader how to hear the dynamics of the poetic line. In the first chapter on Homer, for example, he discusses two major features of dactylic hexameter that contribute to the subtlety and power of the poetry: the presence of pauses in the hexameter that coincide with sense units and create varying rhythms that deepen a listener's experience of the poetry, and the ordering of syntactical units to allow a listener to understand immediately what he hears.

Edwards helps readers understand the significance of his discussion in a variety of ways: for example, in chapter 1, he summarizes formulaic theory and the changes in our understanding of the formula since Parry, as well as Frankel's earlier identification of word groups in the hexameter line. He can justifiably claim that, through these methods, he has shown, even to a Greekless reader, how Homer "constantly varies the position of the pauses in the verses, the places where sentences begin and end, and their grammatical structures" (36), and he has demonstrated that the kind of careful, line-by-line reading of Homer that happens in an intermediate Greek class, say, can be a valuable way of revealing significant aspects of Homeric poetry.

Edwards, however, does not always succeed, I think, in addressing his varied audience. This is, perhaps, not surprising, given the difficult task he has set himself of revealing an aural experience in writing to those who do and do not know the languages in which that experience takes place. For example, he surveys formulaic theory in a way that would baffle a neophyte without satisfying a classicist. He appeals to the ear of an English speaker by citing passages of Tennyson, but what reader these days has the sound of Tennyson's poetry sufficiently in his or her ear to make the analogy revealing? And how successful is the analogy between, for example, the pattern of long and short syllables in a Greek lecythion ( and the words DUM-de-DUM-de-DUM-de-DUM on a page.

I could not be more sympathetic to Edwards' goal of bringing back to life the aural experience of ancient poetry. And when Edwards writes about the organization of Homeric narrative or the dynamic of constant reinterpretation that happens when one hears a poem of Propertius with an awareness of the ambiguities created by Latin case endings and word order, he captures brilliantly important aspects of the aural experience of ancient poetry that are available to all his readers. But when, for example, he tackles quantitative rhythm through analogies with English stress rhythm without discussing the differences, the project of making the sound familiar to the English ear seems to do a disservice to the Greek. In all fairness, I am not sure what else a teacher can do—and, again, the goal of the book is to give inspiration to teachers—unless one teaches students how to perform Greek poetry.

The second chapter on Homer is more successful in revealing oral features of the poem. In...

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