He listened to a lengthy exposition of the Homer de nos jours, the formulaic Homer of Milman Parry and Lord, a Homer improvising with interchangeable parts, a wealth of formulae to fill out the meter; and replied with a wicked twinkle, "But that doesn't explain why Homer is so much better than everyone else."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, October 13, 2006
Ezra Pound on Homer
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 559: