Corinna – from the ancient roots of poetic tradition
This week’s post offers the 20th female poet presented over the past several months, in our efforts to give fair credit to those previously referred to as “the fairer sex.” Next week we will change gears and begin an exploration of poetic themes. Poets will be chosen for their work, not their gender. The presentations will include several poets each week. And now, on to our final poet in the series, “Womankind.”
Corinna, was a lyric poet from ancient Greece. Although ancient sources portray her as a contemporary of Pindar (born c. 518 BC and died c. 438 BC), not all modern scholars accept the accuracy of this tradition. The most common consensus is that she lived in the 5th century BC. If Corinna and Pindar were contemporaries, some experts speculate that she may have taught him poetic arts, or that she may have been a fellow pupil. Corinna was said to have competed with Pindar, defeating him in at least one poetry competition, though some sources claim five.
The importance of Corinna’s possible interactions with Pindar centers on the fact that they were both lyric poets. Lyric poetry is distinguished in that it is accompanied by music. The fact that Corinna’s poetry comes down to us only in papyrus fragments prevents comparing the work of the two.
Let’s have a brief look at Pindar considering the influences of culture and society of the time as well as possible similarities with Corinna. Please consider these short comments as representative possibilities, not fact. Pindar was the first Greek poet to reflect on the nature of poetry and on the poet's role. He also articulates a passionate faith in what men can achieve by the grace of the gods,
As Quintilian notes: "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence”. His poems can, however, seem difficult and even peculiar. Many of Pindar's idiosyncrasies are typical of archaic genres rather than of only the poet himself, so Corinna may have shared these qualities. His poetry, while admired by critics, still challenges the casual reader and today, his work is largely unread among the general public.
Corinna, like Pindar, wrote choral poetry; we know this because this is demonstrated by her invocation of Terpsichore, the Muse the of dance and chorus, in one of her fragments. She wrote five books of poetry. Her works were collected in a Boeotian edition in the late third or early second century BC, and later Hellenistic and Roman texts of Corinna derived from these.
Corinna wrote in a literary dialect, which had features of her Boeotian (central Greece) vernacular, along with similarities to the language of epic both in morphology and in her choice of words; Daniel Berman describes it as "epic written as Boeotian". If Corinna was a contemporary of Pindar, this use of the local vernacular as a literary language is an extremely old. On the other hand, if she is to be located closer to the Hellenistic period, parallels can be found in the poetry of others of the time; for example, the work of Theocritus who also used features of his native dialect.
POEMS
Corinna's works survive only in fragments: three substantial sections of poems are preserved on second-century AD papyri from Egypt; several shorter pieces survive in quotations by ancient grammarians. They focus on local Boeotian legends, and are distinctive for their mythological innovations. Corinna's poetry often reworks well-known myths to include details not known from any other sources. Though respected in her hometown, Tanagra, and popular in ancient Rome, modern critics regard her as provincial and dull; her poetry is nonetheless of interest as the work of one of the few preserved female poets from ancient Greece.
Exploration 1: Should a poet be recognized as residing in the poetic pantheon when all that remains of her work is on badly fragmented papyrus?
Exploration 2: Is there a benefit to comparing/contrasting two poets who lived contemporaneously?
Exploration 3: Why or why not is it relevant today to study ancient poets?
Comments
Post a Comment