The First Poets

European poetry takes its bearings from a brilliant constellation of classical Greek writers whose lives (where they are known as legend or fact) and work (as it survives) continue to inform our writing and reading, even as the original languages, once central to a humane education, fall into disuse.

The poets' stories, their loves, lusts and longings, the forms they devised, their rhetorical strategies, are vital in urgent ways - modern poets such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have drawn inspiration from them.

In this book Michael Schmidt writes about the Greek poets who have had most influence.

The obvious ones Homer and Sappho gaiin from the presence of important lesser-known writers including the lyricist Anacreon, Theocritus the father of pastoral, and Hipponax.

Where the lives are verifiable they are fascinating.

Where true lives are shrouded in mystery, later writers and readers provide narratives of their own.

We know more about Homer than Homer could ever know about himself.

The classics have been alive for more than a millennium in our literature. The object of this book is to entertain, inform and create an awareness of necessary presences: these are poets out of whom our imaginations, like our literatures, are woven.