Antiquity has always been, to me, a radiant world, to be visited on a kind of time-machine, mainly on the wings of poetry; a world of brightness, vigour, wisdom, heroism, yes; a world, too, in which there is laughter. Plenty of hard work, certainly; whether it is a matter of learning what is already written, or going out and discovering more; or criticizing; or applying one's knowledge to the strange world in which, as in Plato's cave, we are compelled to live our daily lives.
"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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Saturday, November 09, 2019
A Radiant World
H.W. Stubbs (1917-2014), "Troubles of a Lexicographer," Pegasus 5 (1966) 10-15 (at 11):