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cration. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the educational
function of Virgil's poem was analogous to that of the Homeric poems
in antiquity. In China the
Shih Ching
(Book of Songs), an anthology of
ancient poems compiled by Confucius, had the same civilizing influence.
In Japan this mission was fulfilled by the
Manyoshu
(The Ten-Thousand–
Leaf Collection) and the great anthologies that followed it. Poetry as the
founding Word of a people is a feature that appears in every civilization,
from the poem of Gilgamesh, the probable source of our epic tradition,
to that of the Cid. In other cultures, poetry was intimately associated
not only with religion and mythology but also with the other arts. We
know, for instance, that the Aztecs recited, sang, and what is even more
noteworthy, danced their poems. Another feature common to ancient
societies: the confraternities, brotherhoods, order of poets. These groups
frequently fulfilled religious and liturgical functions . Among many
peoples, poets were regarded as clairvoyants and soothsayers. It was
widely believed that the poet knew the future because he knew the past.
His knowledge was the knowledge of origins. In such societies, the
present and the future are both functions , in the mathematical sense of
the word, of the past.
The collections of poetic texts, true founding writings, constituted
what our secular society today calls a
classical canon.
Without these poems
it is impossible to know and understand their societies. The aesthetic,
ethical, and philosophical influence they exerted was immense. In Greece,
tragedy was nurtured by the epic, both its conflicts and its heroes. Simi–
larly, philosophy began as a critique of Homer, of his theology and
moral code. The classical canon was transmitted through the education
of adolescents: poetry was a principal subject in the curriculum of the
young. Thus, alongside civic and religious education, and exercises in
preparation for combat, poetry was an initiation into adult life and its
two great facets: action and contemplation. Citizen, patrician,
eques,
mandarin,
tecuhtli,
and other social groups and categories that managed
the affairs of ancient societies in both peace and war - all were educated,
formed by a poetic tradition that inspired their public discourse and their
public action.
The influence of poetry was equally profound in private life: eroti–
cism, friendship, piety in the form of mercy toward one's unfortunate
fellow man (Achilles face-to-face with Priam), solitude, the bitter plea–
sures of melancholy, the fragile realm of memory. Poets helped us to
know what the passions were, and hence to know ourselves: envy, sensu–
ality, cruelty, hypocrisy - in short, all the complexity of the human soul.
The first great love poem of the West dates from the third century
B.C.:
Theocritus's pointed tale of the sensual and ingenuous, rabid and sublime
love of the ill-starred young Simetha. Later, in Rome, Catullus and
