Alcaeus | G. M. Kirkwood (essay date 1974)
G. M. Kirkwood (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: Kirkwood, G. M. “Alcaeus.” In Early Greek Monody: The History of a Poetic Type, pp. 53-99. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974.
[In the following essay, Kirkwood analyzes Alcaeus's poetry and what the fragments reveal of his political thought.]
Both Alcaeus and Sappho are the spiritual successors of Archilochus, because both continue his contemporaneity of subject matter and his intensity of self-expression. They may owe specific debts; there is, as we shall see, some evidence of direct imitation by Alcaeus. But it is a long step from Archilochus's asynartetic verses and epodes to the four-line stanzas of Alcaic and Sapphic strophe.1 The choral poetry of Alcman and Stesichorus,2 who wrote contemporaneously or shortly before them, bears no striking similarities to their poetry; any influence, in either direction, can have been only slight. But there were other...
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