Rise of Greek Epic - Oxford Paperbacks Author:Gilbert Murray Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: i POETRY AND PROGRESS 23 It is then from this point of view that I wish to discuss certain parts of Greek poetry: as a manifestation of the spirit of upward s... more »triving in man, which we roughly describe as Progress. But here a further question suggests itself. I feel that many among my hearers, especially perhaps among those who care most for art and for poetry, will protest against regarding poetry from this point of view at all. Science, they will say, progresses : but poetry does not. When we call a poem immortal, we mean that it is never superseded: and that implies that poetry itself does not progress. This doctrine, when rigidly held, is apt, I think, to neglect the very complex nature of most of the concrete works of poetry. One may gladly admit that the essential and un- definable quality that we call poetry, the quality of being poetical, is one of the eternal things in life. There is something in Homer and the Book of Job which cannot be superseded, any more than the beauty of a spring morning or the sea or a mother's love for a child can be superseded. But, after all, this essential spirit has always to clothe itself in a body of some sort, and that body is made up of elements which admit of progress and decay. All the intellectual elements of poetry are progressive. Wider fields of knowledge may constantly be thrown open to the poet. Beauty may be discovered in fresh places. There may be increased delicacy, or at least increased minuteness, of observation. There is, most important of all, a possibility of change in the emotionswhich form the raw material of poetry. Wordsworth was not, perhaps, so great a poet as the Deutero-Isaiah, yet Wordsworth would not have howled for joy that' The mountains should be molten with the blood of Edom '. And, still more certainly, t...« less