LITERATURE

A body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject matter. Definitions of the word literature tend to be circular. The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary considers literature to be writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest. The 19th-century critic Walter Pater referred to the matter of imaginative or artistic literature as a transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitely varied forms. But such definitions assume that the reader already knows what literature is. And indeed its central meaning, at least, is clear enough. Deriving from the Latin littera, a letter of the alphabet, literature is first and foremost humankind's entire body of writing; after that it is the body of writing belonging to a given language or people; then it is individual pieces of writing. But already it is necessary to qualify these statements. To use the word writing when describing literature is itself misleading, for one may speak of oral literature or the literature of preliterate peoples. The art of literature is not reducible to the words on the page; they are there solely because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature might be described as the organization of words to give pleasure. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond mere pleasure. Literature also functions more broadly in society as a means of both criticizing and affirming cultural values. POETRY Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possiblyunder some definitionsthe primal and primary form of languages themselves. The present article means only to describe in as general a way as possible certain properties of poetry and of poetic thought regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind. Naturally, not every tradition nor every local or individual variation can beor need beincluded, but the article illustrates by examples of poetry ranging between nursery rhyme and epic. This article considers the difficulty or impossibility of defining poetry; man's nevertheless familiar acquaintance with it; the differences between poetry and prose; the idea of form in poetry; poetry as a mode of thought; and what little may be said in prose of the spirit of poetry. Poetry and prose People's reason for wanting a definition is to take care of the borderline case, and this is what a definition, as if by definition, will not do. That is, if a man asks for a definition of poetry, it will most certainly not be the case that he has never seen one of the objects called poems that are said to embody poetry; on the contrary, he is already tolerably certain what poetry in the main is, and his reason for wanting a definition is either that his certainty has been challenged by someone else or that he wants to take care of a possible or seeming exception to it: hence the perennial squabble about distinguishing poetry from prose, which is rather like distinguishing rain from snow.

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been . . . . (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets.) The number of nerve fibres in a nerve trunk falls by a quarter As body and soul begin to fall asunder Happily, if poetry is almost impossible to define, it is extremely easy to recognize in experience; even untutored children are rarely in doubt about it when it appears: Little Jack Jingle, He used to live single, But when he got tired of this kind of life, He left off being single, and liv'd with his wife. It might be objected that this little verse is not of sufficient import and weight to serve as an exemplar for poetry. It ought to be remembered, though, that it has given people pleasure so that they continued to say it until and after it was written down, nearly two centuries ago. The verse has survived, and its survival has something to do with pleasure, with delight; and while it still lives, how many more imposing works of languageepic poems, books of science, philosophy, theologyhave gone down, deservedly or not, into dust and silence. It has, obviously, a form, an arrangement of sounds in relation to thoughts that somehow makes its agreeable nonsense closed, complete, and decisive. But this somewhat muddled matter of form deserves a heading and an instance all to itself. Poetry as a mode of thought: the Protean encounter In the fourth book of the Odyssey Homer tells the following strange tale. After the war at Troy, Menelaus wanted very much to get home but was held up in Egypt for want of a wind because, as he later told Telemachus, he had not sacrificed enough to the gods. Ever jealous the Gods are, he said, that we men mind their dues. But because the gods work both ways, it was on the advice of a goddess, Eidothea, that Menelaus went to consult Proteus, the old one of the sea, as one might consult a travel agency. Proteus was not easy to consult. He was herding seals, and the seals stank even through the ambrosia Eidothea had provided. And when Menelaus crept up close, disguised as a seal, and grabbed him, Proteus turned into a lion, a dragon, a leopard, a boar, a film of water, and a highbranched tree. But Menelaus managed to hang on until Proteus gave up and was himself again; whereupon Menelaus asked him the one great question: How do I get home? And Proteus told him: You had better go back to Egypt and sacrifice to the gods some more.

This story may be taken as a parable about poetry. A man has an urgent question about his way in the world. He already knows the answer, but it fails to satisfy him. So at great inconvenience, hardship, and even peril, he consults a powerful and refractory spirit who tries to evade his question by turning into anything in the world. Then, when the spirit sees he cannot get free of the man, and only then, he answers the man's question, not simply with a commonplace but with the same commonplace the man had been dissatisfied with before. Satisfied or not, however, the man now obeys the advice given him. A poet also has one great and simple question, simple though it may take many forms indeed. Geoffrey Chaucer put it as well as anyone could, and in three lines at that: What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave, Allone, with-outen any companye. (The Knight's Tale)

When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer's green all girded up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, Then of thy beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets and beauties must themselves forsake And die as fast as they see others grow; And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 12.) When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste; Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight. Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd and sorrows end. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 30)

This poem, acknowledged to be a masterpiece by so many generations of readers, may stand as an epitome and emblem for the art altogether, about which it raises a question that must be put, although it cannot be satisfactorily and unequivocally answered: the question of whether poetry is a sacrament or a confidence game or both or neither. To reply firmly that poetry is not religion and must not promise what religion does is to preserve a useful distinction; nevertheless, the religions of the world, if they have nothing else in common, seem to be based on collections of sacred poems. Nor, at the other extreme, can any guarantee that poetry is not a confidence game be found in the often-heard appeal to the poet's sincerity. One will never know whether Shakespeare wept all over the page while writing the 30th sonnet, though one inclines to doubt it, nor would it be to his credit if he did, nor to the reader's that he should know it or care to know it. LYRIC POETRY Lyric poetry never gets far from its origins, except that some of its finest examples Medieval Latin, Provenal, Middle High German, Middle French, Renaissancewhich today are only read, were actually written to be sung. In the 20th century, however, popular songs of great literary merit became increasingly commonfor example, the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in German, of Georges Brassens and Anne Sylvestre in French, and of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. It is interesting to note that, in periods when the culture values artificiality, the lyric becomes stereotyped. Then, after a while, the poets revolt and, usually turning to folk origins, restore to lyric poetry at least the appearance of naturalness and spontaneity. Averse or poem that is, or supposedly is, susceptible of being sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument (in ancient times, usually a lyre) or that expresses intense personal emotion in a manner suggestive of a song. Lyric poetry expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet and is sometimes contrasted with narrative poetry and verse drama, which relate events in the form of a story. Elegies, odes, and sonnets are all important kinds of lyric poetry. In ancient Greece an early distinction was made between the poetry chanted by a choir of singers (choral lyrics) and the song that expressed the sentiments of a single poet. The latter, the melos, or song proper, had reached a height of technical perfection in the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung, as early as the 7th century BC. That poetess, together with her contemporary Alcaeus, were the chief Doric poets of the pure Greek song. By their side, and later, flourished the great poets who set words to music for choirs, Alcman, Arion, Stesichorus, Simonides, and Ibycus, who were followed at the close of the 5th century by Bacchylides and Pindar, in whom the tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest development. Latin lyrics were written by Catullus and Horace in the 1st century BC; and in medieval Europe the lyric form can be found in the songs of the troubadours, in Christian hymns, and in various ballads. In the Renaissance the most finished form of lyric, the sonnet, was brilliantly developed by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton. Especially identified with the lyrical forms of poetry in the late 18th and 19th centuries were the Romantic poets, including such diverse figures as Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Goethe, and Heinrich Heine. With the exception of some dramatic verse, most Western poetry in the late 19th and the 20th century may be classified as lyrical.

SATIRE The forms of satire are as manifold as those of literature itselffrom those of the mock epic to the biting epigram. A great many social and political novels of today would have been regarded as satire by the ancients. Many of the great works of all time are satires, but in each case they have risen far above their immediate satirical objectives. The 16th-century medieval satire on civilization, the Gargantua and Pantagruel of Franois Rabelais, grew under the hand of its author into a great archetypal myth of the lust for life. Cervantes' Don Quixote, often called the greatest work of prose fiction in the West, is superficially a satire of the sentimental romance of knightly adventure. But, again, it is an archetypal myth, telling the adventures of the soul of manof the individualin the long struggle with what is called the human condition. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu has sometimes been considered by obtuse critics as no more than a satire on the sexual promiscuity of the Heian court. In fact, it is a profoundly philosophical, religious, and mystical novel. Elizabethan writers, anxious to follow Classical models but misled by a false etymology, believed that satyre derived from the Greek satyr play: satyrs being notoriously rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to follow that the word satyre should indicate something harsh, coarse, rough. The English author Joseph Hall wrote:
The Satyre should be like the Porcupine, That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line, And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye, Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily. (Virgidemiarum, V,3, 14.)

The false etymology that derives satire from satyrs was finally exposed in the 17th century by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon; but the old tradition has aesthetic if not etymological appropriateness and has remained strong.

In the prologue to his book, Hall makes a claim that has caused confusion like that following from Quintilian's remark on Roman satire. Hall boasts:
I first adventure: follow me who list, And be the second English Satyrist.

But Hall knew the satirical poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Skelton, among other predecessors, and probably meant that he was the first to imitate systematically the formal satirists of Rome. Pope's Dunciad ends with these lines:
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All.

DRAMA Like lyric poetry, drama has been an exceptionally stable literary form. Given a little leeway, most plays written by the beginning of the 20th century could be adjusted to the rules of Aristotle's Poetics. Before World War I, however, all traditional art forms, led by painting, began to disintegrate, and new forms evolved to take their place. In drama the most radical innovator was August Strindberg (18491912), and from that day to this, drama (forced to compete with the cinema) has become ever more experimental, constantly striving for new methods, materials, and, especially, ways to establish a close relationship with the audience. All this activity has profoundly modified drama as literature. ORAL World-famous speech delivered by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication (Nov. 19, 1863) of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., the site of one of the decisive battles of the American Civil War (July 13, 1863). GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicatewe can not consecratewe can not hallowthis ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before usthat from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotionthat we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vainthat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedomand that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
BALLAD Short narrative folk song whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have little affected the habit of folk singing. Typically, the folk ballad tells a compact little story that begins eruptively at the moment when the narrative has turned decisively toward its catastrophe or resolution. Focusing on a single, climactic situation, the ballad leaves the inception of the conflict and the setting to be inferred or sketches them in hurriedly. Characterization is minimal, the characters revealing themselves in their actions or speeches; overt moral comment on the characters' behaviour is suppressed and their motivation seldom explicitly detailed. Whatever description occurs in

ballads is brief and conventional; transitions between scenes are abrupt and time shifts are only vaguely indicated; crucial events and emotions are conveyed in crisp, poignant dialogue. In short, the ballad method of narration is directed toward achieving a bold, sensational, dramatic effect with purposeful starkness and abruptness. But despite the rigid economy of ballad narratives, a repertory of rhetorical devices is employed for prolonging highly charged moments in the story and thus thickening the emotional atmosphere. In the most famous of such devices, incremental repetition, a phrase or stanza is repeated several times with a slight but significant substitution at the same critical point. Suspense accumulates with each substitution, until at last the final and revelatory substitution bursts the pattern, achieving a climax and with it a release of powerful tensions. The following stanza is a typical example: Then out and came the thick, thick, blood, Then out and came the thin, Then out and came the bonny heart's blood, Where all the life lay in.

Technique and form

Ballads are normally composed in two kinds of stanzas; the first consists of a couplet of lines each with four stressed syllables, and with an interwoven refrain: But it would have made your heart right sair, With a hey ho and a lillie gay To see the bridegroom rive his haire. As the primrose spreads so sweetly the second a stanza of alternating lines of four stresses and three stresses, the second and fourth lines rhyming: There lived a wife at Usher's Well, And a wealthy wife was she; She had three stout and stalwart sons, And sent them o'er the sea. So he ordered the grave to be opened wide, And the shroud to be turned down; And there he kissed her clay cold lips Till the tears came trickling down, down, down, Till the tears came trickling down The refrain is just one of the many kinds of repetition employed in ballads. Incremental repetition, already discussed, is the structural principle on which whole ballads (The Maid Freed from the Gallows, Lord Randal) are organized, and many other ballads contain long exchanges of similarly patterned phrases building cumulatively toward the denouement: Oh what will you leave to your father dear? The silver-shod steed that brought me here. What will you leave to your mother dear? My velvet pall and my silken gear. What will you leave to your brother John? The gallows-tree to hang him on.

Any compressed narrative of sensational happenings told at a high pitch of feeling is bound to repeat words and phrases in order to accommodate the emotion that cannot be exhausted in one saying, a tendency that accounts for such stanzas as: Then He says to His mother, Oh: the withy [willow], oh: the withy, The bitter withy that causes me to smart, to smart, Oh: the withy, it shall be the very first tree That perishes at the heart.

A ballad is not technically a ballad unless it is sung; but though tunes and texts are dynamically interdependent, it is not unusual to find the same version of a ballad being sung to a variety of tunes of suitable rhythm and metre or to find the same tune being used for several different ballads. And just as there are clusters of versions for most ballads, so a given ballad may have associated with it a family of tunes whose members appear to be versions of a single prototypical form. Ballad tunes are based on the modes rather than on the diatonic and chromatic scales that are used in modern music. Where chromaticism is detected in American folk music, the inflected tones are derived from black folk practice or from learned music. Of the six modes, the preponderance of folk tunes are Ionian, Dorian, or Mixolydian; Lydian and Phrygian tunes are rare. The folk music least affected by sophisticated conditioning does not avail itself of the full seven tones that compose each of the modal scales. Instead, it exhibits gapped scales, omitting either one of the tones (hexatonic) or two of them (pentatonic). Modulation sometimes occurs in a ballad from one mode to an adjacent mode. NOVEL an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historicalto name only some of the more important ones. The novel is a genre of fiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough to constitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella (or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches its brevity, a novelette), and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuve, or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre.

The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a late variant of novus, meaning new), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio's Decameron, each of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys; they are not reworkings of known fables or myths, and they are lacking in weight and moral earnestness. It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most profound seriousness, such as Tolstoy, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the term novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And it is possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it from aesthetic or moral corruption, but the novel can descend to shameful commercial depths of sentimentality or pornography. It is the purpose of this section to consider the novel not solely in terms of great art but also as an all-purpose medium catering for all the strata of literacy. EPIC The true heroic epic never evolved far from its preliterate origins, and it arose only in the Heroic Age which preceded a settled civilization. The conditions reflected in, say, the Iliad and Odyssey are much the same as those of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the German Nibelungenlied, or the Irish stories of C Chulainn. The literary epic is another matter altogether. Virgil's Aeneid, for instance, or John Milton's Paradise Lost are products of highly sophisticated literary cultures. Many long poems sometimes classified as epic literature are no such thingDante's La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), for example, is a long theological, philosophical, political, moral, and mystical poem. Dante considered it to be a kind of drama which obeyed the rules of Aristotle's Poetics. Goethe's Faust is in dramatic form and is sometimes even stagedbut it is really a philosophical poetic novel. Modern critics have described long poems such as T.S. Eliot's Waste Land and Ezra Pound's Cantos as philosophical epics. There is nothing epic about them; they are reveries, more or less philosophical. GILGAMESH EPIC The best known of all ancient Mesopotamian heroes. Numerous tales in the Akkadian language have been told about Gilgamesh, and the whole collection has been described as an odyssey the odyssey of a king who did not want to die. The fullest extant text of the Gilgamesh epic is on 12 incomplete Akkadian-language tablets found at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (reigned 668627 BC). The gaps that occur in the tablets have been partly filled by various fragments found elsewhere in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. In addition, five short poems in the Sumerian language are known from tablets that were written during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC; the poems have been entitled Gilgamesh and Huwawa, Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, and The Death of Gilgamesh. The Gilgamesh of the poems and of the epic tablets was probably the Gilgamesh who ruled at Uruk in southern Mesopotamia sometime during the first half of the 3rd millennium BC and who was thus a contemporary of Agga, ruler of Kish; Gilgamesh of Uruk was also mentioned in the Sumerian list of kings as reigning after the Flood. There is, however, no historical evidence for the exploits narrated in poems and epic.

The Ninevite version of the epic begins with a prologue in praise of Gilgamesh, part divine and part human, the great builder and warrior, knower of all things on land and sea. In order to curb Gilgamesh's seemingly harsh rule, the god Anu caused the creation of Enkidu, a wild man who at first lived among animals. Soon, however, Enkidu was initiated into the ways of city life and traveled to Uruk, where Gilgamesh awaited him. Tablet II describes a trial of strength between the two men in which Gilgamesh was the victor; thereafter, Enkidu was the friend and companion (in Sumerian texts, the servant) of Gilgamesh. In Tablets IIIV the two men set out together against Huwawa (Humbaba), the divinely appointed guardian of a remote cedar forest, but the rest of the engagement is not recorded in the surviving fragments. In Tablet VI Gilgamesh, who had returned to Uruk, rejected the marriage proposal of Ishtar, the goddess of love, and then, with Enkidu's aid, killed the divine bull that she had sent to destroy him. Tablet VII begins with Enkidu's account of a dream in which the gods Anu, Ea, and Shamash decided that he must die for slaying the bull. Enkidu then fell ill and dreamed of the house of dust that awaited him. Gilgamesh's lament for his friend and the state funeral of Enkidu are narrated in Tablet VIII. Afterward, Gilgamesh made a dangerous journey (Tablets IX and X) in search of Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Babylonian Flood, in order to learn from him how to escape death. He finally reached Utnapishtim, who told him the story of the Flood and showed him where to find a plant that would renew youth (Tablet XI). But after Gilgamesh obtained the plant, it was seized by a serpent, and Gilgamesh unhappily returned to Uruk. An appendage to the epic, Tablet XII, related the loss of objects called pukku and mikku (perhaps drum and drumstick) given to Gilgamesh by Ishtar. The epic ends with the return of the spirit of Enkidu, who promised to recover the objects and then gave a grim report on the underworld.

The Iliad
The Iliad is not merely a distillation of the whole protracted war against Troy but simultaneously an exploration of the heroic ideal in all its self-contradictorinessits insane and grasping pride, its magnificent but animal strength, its ultimate if obtuse humanity. The poem is, in truth, the story of the wrath of Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side, that is announced in its very first words; yet for thousands of verses on end Achilles is an unseen presence as he broods among his Myrmidons, waiting for Zeus's promise to be fulfilledthe promise that the Trojans will set fire to the Achaean ships and force King Agamemnon to beg him to return to the fight. Much of the poetry between the first book, in which the quarrel flares up, and the 16th, in which Achilles makes the crucial concession of allowing his friend Patroclus to fight on his behalf, consists of long scenes of battle, in which individual encounters alternate with mass movements of the opposing armies. The battle poetry is based on typical and frequently recurring elements and motifs, but it is also subtly varied by highly individualized episodes and set pieces: the catalog of troop contingents, the formal duels between Paris and Menelaus and Ajax and Hector, Helen's identifying of the Achaean princes, Agamemnon inspecting his troops, the triumph of Diomedes, Hector's famous meeting back in Troy with his wife Andromache, the building of the Achaean wall, the unsuccessful embassy to Achilles, the night expedition, Hera's seduction of Zeus and Poseidon's subsequent invigoration of the Achaeans. Patroclus' death two-thirds of the way through the poem brings Achilles back into the fight, although not before the recovery of Patroclus' body, the making of new divine armour for Achilles, and his formal reconciliation with Agamemnon. In book 22 he kills the deluded Hector; next he restores his heroic status by means of the funeral games for Patroclus; and in the concluding book Achilles is compelled by the gods to restore civilized values and his own magnanimity by surrendering Hector's body to King Priam.

The Odyssey
The Odyssey tends to be blander in expression and sometimes more diffuse in the progress of its action, but it presents an even more complex and harmonious structure than the Iliad. The main elements are the situation in Ithaca, where Penelope, Odysseus' wife, and their young son, Telemachus, are powerless before her arrogant suitors as they despair of Odysseus' return from the siege of Troy; Telemachus' secret journey to the Peloponnese for news of his father, and his encounters there with Nestor, Menelaus, and Helen; Odysseus' dangerous passage, opposed by the sea-god Poseidon himself, from Calypso's island to that of the Phaeacians, and his narrative there (from book 9 to book 12) of his fantastic adventures after leaving Troy, including his escape from the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus; his arrival back in Ithaca, solitary and by night, at the poem's halfway point, followed by his meeting with his protector-goddess Athena, his elaborate disguises, his self-revelation to the faithful swineherd Eumaeus and then to Telemachus, their complicated plan for disposing of the suitors, and its gory fulfillment. Finally comes the recognition by his faithful Penelope, his recounting to her of his adventures, his meeting with his aged father, Laertes, and the restitution, with Athena's help, of stability in his island kingdom of Ithaca.

Divine Comedy
long narrative poem written c. 130821 by Dante. It is usually held to be one of the world's great works of literature. Divided into three major sectionsInferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisothe narrative traces the journey of Dante from darkness and error to the revelation of the divine light, culminating in the Beatific Vision of God. Dante is guided by the Roman poet Virgil, who represents the epitome of human knowledge, from the dark wood through the descending circles of the pit of Hell (Inferno). Passing Lucifer at the pit's bottom, at the dead-centre of the world, Dante and Virgil emerge on the beach of the island mountain of Purgatory. At the summit of Purgatory, where repentant sinners are purged of their sins, Virgil departs, having led Dante as far as human knowledge is able, to the threshold of Paradise. There Dante is met by Beatrice, embodying the knowledge of divine mysteries bestowed by Grace, who leads him through the successive ascending levels of heaven to the Empyrean, where he is allowed to glimpse, for a moment, the glory of God. An early translation of La divina commedia into English was by Henry Boyd (1802). There are several later translations, the best-known among which are those by Dorothy L. Sayers and B. Reynolds (194962), W.F. Ennis (1965), and John Ciardi (1977).

PHILIPPINE LITERATURE Philippine literature had its beginnings in great epics that were handed down orally from generation to generation and sung on festive occasions. When the Philippines became part of the Spanish empire in the 16th century, printing was introduced, and all the early published works in the vernacular (Tagalog) were of Christian religious subjects. Eventually, some individual romantic legends taken from the epics were published, but they had acquired a European flavour. An outstanding work in the early years of the 19th century was an epic romance called Florante at Laura by the first native writer to achieve prominenceFrancisco Balagtaswho wrote in Tagalog. In the latter half of the 19th century, an intellectual renaissance coincided with the beginnings of a national movement toward freedom; writers began using Spanish, for their work was part of the nationalist propaganda. The most famous author was Jos Rizal, who wrote a series of brilliant social novels, beginning with Noli me tangere (Touch Me Not). Other prominent writers, all essayists, were Mariano Ponce and Rafael Palma. There were poets also for example, Jos Palma, whose poem "Filipinas" was later adopted as the national anthem. After the United States had taken over the Philippines, Spanish was gradually replaced by English, and new writers began to use that language as their medium. But before a new national literature could evolve, World War II took a heavy toll of writers, and those who survived became caught up in the political changes that followed. Many still write in Englishthe Spanish tradition, too, remains strongbut more and more writers are turning to Tagalog for literary expression. Whatever indigenous theatrical forms may have existed in the Philippines, other than tribal epic recitations, were obliterated by the Spanish to facilitate the spread of Christianity. The earliest known form of organized theatre is the comedia, or moro-moro, created by Spanish priests. In 1637 a play was written to dramatize the recent capture by a Christian Filipino army of an Islamic stronghold. It was so popular that other plays were written and staged as folk dramas in Christianized villages throughout the Philippines. All told similar stories of Christian armies defeating the hated Moors. With the decline of Spanish influence, the comedia, too, declined in popularity. Some professional troupes performed comedia in Manila and provincial capitals prior to World War II.

The Philippine Arts

Early Spanish chroniclers testified that the Filipinos carved the images of their anitos (gods and goddesses) and ancestors in wood. They also played a variety of musical instruments, including end-blown flutes, nose flutes, jew's harps, gongs, drums, and lutes, among others. Various seasonal celebrations (e.g., harvest) and life rituals (e.g., courtship and marriage) called for certain instrumental music, songs, and dances. For instance, in some of the Muslim communities of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, the kulintang ensemble, consisting of a set of gongs suspended horizontally and vertically and a single-headed drum, can still be heard at festive events. Some of the local dance traditions have been preserved or reinterpreted by contemporary performing groups such as Bayanihan (the national folk dance company of the Philippines), established in the mid-20th century, as well as by the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group and Ballet Philippines. A growing number of world music artists, such as Joey Ayala, have been creating innovative syntheses of indigenous Philippine traditionssuch as kulintangand popular music form.

Many Filipino musicians have risen to prominence in the Western classical music tradition, including the composer and conductor Antonio J. Molina, the composer Felipe P. de Leon (known for his nationalistic themes), and the opera singer Jovita Fuentes. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Folk Arts Theater, and the restored Manila Metropolitan Theatre (all in Manila) provide homes for the performing arts, featuring local and foreign opera and ballet. To encourage the development of arts, the government gives awards of recognition and maintains a National Arts Center (established 1976), which includes the Philippine High School for the Arts in Los Baos, south of Manila. Filipino painters have included Juan Luna, whose agitated works helped inspire a sense of Filipino nationalism in the late 19th century; Fernando Amorsolo, who is known for his traditional rural scenes; the muralists Carlos V. Francisco and Vicente Manansala; and the modernists Victorio Edades and Arturo Rogerio Luz. Among sculptors, Guillermo Tolentino and Napoleon Abueva are prominent. Rural artists from mountainous regions in northern Luzon and craftsmen living northwest of Manila and in Paete on the eastern shore of Laguna de Bay are known for wood carvings. Romblon and other nearby islands are noted for their marble sculptures. Notable Filipino architects include Juan F. Nakpil, Otilio Arellano, Fernando Ocampo, Leandro Locsin, Juan Arellano, Carlos Arguelles, and Tomas Mapua. The outspoken political novels of nationalist leader Jos Rizal were Philippine literary landmarks of the late 19th century, and the work of Nick Joaquin has been among the most highly acclaimed Philippine literature since the mid-20th century. The diverse cultural heritage of the country not only animates most of Joaquin's fiction writing, but it is also central to his nonfiction work. Among the most celebrated of Joaquin's works are his play A Portrait of an Artist as a Filipino (1966) and his biography of assassinated presidential candidate Benigno Aquino, The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay on History as Three Generations (1983). Spanish was the prinicipal literary medium until the end of the 19th century, before yielding to English after U.S. occupation. Since independence an increasing number of writers have been composing their works in Filipino or Tagalog. Filipinos have a tradition rich in local and regional lore. Myths and legends deal with such subjects as the origin of the world, the first man and woman on earth, why the sky is high, why the sea is salty, and why there are different races. Other tales are associated with the Spanish conquest. On the island of Mindanao an epic known as the Darangen (To Narrate in Song) depicts the historical and mythological world of the Maranao community, while in northern Luzon the Ilocano epic Biag ni Lam-ang (Life of Lam-ang) recounts the exploits of a traditional folk hero. The Philippines has produced a handful of internationally acclaimed films, including Himala (1982), which recounts the adventures of a young miracle worker; Oro, Plata, Mata (1982), the story of two noble families on the island of Negros during World War II; and Small Voices (2002), the tale of a teacher in an impoverished rural community who, through music, inspires her students to shed their cynicism. Dances and dramas from Spain were brought in, some of which took root. The Mara Clara, a stately minuet, and the Rigodn de Honor, a quadrille, were adopted by local European society for its formal balls. Spain's sprightly operetta, the zarzuela, became the favourite light entertainment in Manila and other cities. Western classics and recent popular successes are staged, and in recent years many original plays have been written to celebrate the Filipino heritage.

Philippine Artist

Filipino Awardees in Music and Dance

Nicanor S. Abelardo Composer and teacher asserted the Filipino sensibility in his compositions, shared his musicality with a generation of equally talented young artists, and revitalized the Filipino tradition in music. He transformed the kundiman into an art song, with his composition between 1923 and 1929, like Nasaan Ka, Irog, Kundiman ng Luha,Magbalik Ka Hirang, Mutya ng Pasig, Himutok, and Paghanga. His works became favorites among the masses and culturati.

Ryan Cayabyab Composer and arranger, gave to popular Filipino music a distinct flavor of ethnicity and nationalism, paving the way for the emergence of the kind of music that is of this generation but at the same time is related to musical tradition. His outstanding works in different musical genres, such as his composition for chorus, orchestra, and ethnic instruments; his award winning scores and musical direction for hit musicales like Katy, Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo, and Ilustrado, and his kundiman and folk song arrangements, constitutes a body of works that allows the global community a glimpse into the best that the Filipino contemporary musician is capable of producing.

Leon Ignacio Composer of the most popular Filipino sarswelas and memorable music for Filipino movies during the first half of the 20th century contributed to the

Philippine Artist
Filipino Awardees in Visual Arts