Homer frustrated writers by using the best Homeric Epithets three-thousand years ago

8 August 2011

When the eminent Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco visited Johns Hopkins some decades ago, he spoke of the problem, for contemporary writers, of the “already said”: the circumstance that because Homer, for example, spoke so memorably in The Odyssey of the “wine-dark sea” and of “rosy-fingered Dawn,” nearly 3,000 years’ worth of poets and storytellers have had to find other images for sea and sunrise — a task that must become increasingly difficult as the repertory of possibilities is exhausted.

It’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it… writers have been struggling for three thousand years to write prose and poetry that is original.

Originally published Monday 8 August 2011, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.