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Article contents
Text as Song: The Oral Aspirations of Anghelos Sikelianos
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
‘Any poem or poet worthy of the name must liberate the pure creative force of the human voice.’
‘The whole of Ancient Greek civilization is a product of poetic utterance: Homer sang; Pindar declaimed; Aeschylus spoke out from behind masks.’
‘Ancient texts — Homer, Hesiod, oracles, Orphic writings and so forth — gradually became the voice of the people.’
These statements were made by Sikelianos in a talk entitled “O 
which he delivered in 1938, and in which he postulates a historical progression from text to voice, rather than the reverse process. They are the statements of a literate poet writing in a literate age, but delighting, at the same time, in the ability of radio to ‘reassert the spell of orality’ (Havelock 1986: 31). They subvert the idea of literacy as progress and propose, in its place, an ideal of post-textual orality. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between such statements and the poetry of Sikelianos.
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- Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1990
References
Havelock, E.A.
1986. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven and London).Google Scholar
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Palmer-Sikelianou, E.
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