The Underworld, Logos, and the Poetic Imagination Essay -- Essays Pape

The Underworld, Logos, and the Poetic Imagination I In the Odyssey of Homer, Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets the soul of Achilles, who bitterly comments on existence after remnant O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.I would kind of follow the plow as thrall to anotherman, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,than be a king over all the perished dead.1 The ancient classical interpretation of death, as expressed by Homer, portrays the Underworld as a horrible place, terrific in its monotony and lack of meaning and Death is something to be feared and avoided as long as possible. Poetrys representation of death has changed dramatically since Homer, especially in the hands of more new-fangled poets like Rilke and Gregory Orr, who, in their handling of the Orpheus and Alcestis myths, allot death as desirable, even more fulfilling than life. In the earlier Greek versions of the Orpheus myth, Eurydice reacts with despair when she loses he r only chance to return to the realm of the living. In the modern verse of Rilke and Orr, however, Eurydice does not want to leave the Underworld. Indeed, returning to life is a painful and dreadful experience for her. She responds to the possibility of life with the same reluctance and fear that the Homeric heroes felt toward death. What has not changed, however, from Homer to the twentieth speed of light is that we do not know what happens after death, and we still use poetry as a fashion of addressing the uncertainty of death. Poetry is our way of immortalizing and idealizing the dead, and, consequently, the poet acts as the bridge between the living and the dead. II The Iliad begins with the invocation of the Muse, or the poet en... ... her back,/ to harm her into memory. Gregory Orr, Betrayals/Hades, Eurydice, Orpheus, in City of Salt, (Pittsburgh University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), ll. 10-15, p. 34. 8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Basic Writings, Edited by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco harpist Collins, 1993), 78. 9 When Heidegger speaks of the Logos with a capital L, he is speaking of some way of higher, transcendent truth. When he speaks of logos with a lower-case l, he simply means word. 10 Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, Basic Writings, Edited by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco Harper Collins, 1977), 125. 11 Heidegger, previous(predicate) Greek Thinkers, Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco Harper Collins, 1975), 73. 12 Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 2, ll. 1-5, p. 229.