Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond

by Gregory Nagy

This book is a comparative study of oral poetics in literate cultures, focusing on the problems of textual fluidity in the transmission of Homeric poetry over half a millennium, from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece. It stresses the role of performance and the performer in the re-creative process of composition-in-performance. It addresses questions of authority and authorship in the making of oral poetry, and it examines the efforts of ancient scholars to edit a definitive text of the "real" Homer.

Genres: Poetry, History, Classics, Nonfiction, Greece

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 1996

About the author

Gregory Nagy is an American professor of Classics at Harvard University, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Reviews

[Jason Kassel, PhD]

Nagy’s central claim - that Greek poetry is not a static text but a performed, meaning-generating event - changes how one reads Homer permanently. What looks at first like philology becomes a theory of how thought is carried in rhythm, repetition, and public recitation. The book is demanding, but the payoff is substantial: poetry here is not ornament but a mode of knowing. Especially valuable for anyone interested in the relationship between myth, memory, and philosophical formation. Not an introductory work, but a foundational one.