Wednesday, December 07, 2005

 

Classical Philology

Ezra Pound, Notes on Elizabethan Classicists (1917-1918):
When the classics were a new beauty and ecstasy people cared a damn sight more about the meaning of the authors, and a damn sight less about their grammar and philology.

***

I know that all classic authors have been authoritatively edited and printed by Teubner, and their wording ultimately settled at Leipzig, but all questions concerning 'the classics' are not definitively settled, cold-storaged, and shelved.

***

It is perhaps important that the classics be humanly, rather than philologically taught, even in class-rooms. A barbaric age given over to education agitates for their exclusion and desuetude. Education is an onanism of the soul. Philology will be ascribed to De la Sade.



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