THE POETRY OF GREEK TRAGEDY.

By Richmond Latimore '26. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 157pp. $3.50.

Much, if not most, of the ever-swelling stream of discussion about Greek tragedy assumes that Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote primarily to inculcate ethical, philosophical, or political creeds, to interpret the spirit of their times, or to provide a vehicle for the exhibition of dramatic and histrionic technique. Professor Lattimore admits the partial validity of all these approaches, but his present study is devoted to showing "some of the ways in which poetry as poetry contributes to drama as drama."

To this end the author selects nine tragedies, reviews the setting and action of each, then cites passages from his own translations to show how poetic diction and imagery combine with character portrayal and other elements to create drama. As he says, this is a "difficult and perhaps impossible" undertaking, but this reviewer believes any careful reader must become aware that it actually is the poetry which holds the essential meaning, the music which makes real the action, the unseen and unheard rhythm and rhetoric of the poet's imagination which perform the miracle. The moral is that it is high time to stop reading poetic plays as if they were prose.

Even in the discussion of complex matters, Professor Lattimore's writing is clear, precise, economical. These Hellenic qualities free the author from the bonds of that other kind of criticism which seems to mistake obscurity for subtlety. Surely, as Iphigenia says, "It is right and proper for Greeks to rule barbarians, mother, not for barbarians to rule Greeks. The one is slave, the other free." Surely then it is right and proper, hence Greek, for a critic of Greek thought to be free to discover a fresh emphasis which will help in the understanding of Greek tragedy - and other things.