Don’t begin your poem the way the old
Cyclic “Homeric” poets saw fit to do it:
“I sing of the famous war and Priam’s fate.”
What’s to come out of the mouth of such a boaster?
The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse.
Ridiculous. He does much better who doesn’t
Try so hard or make such grandiose claims:
“Muse, tell me about the man who, after Troy,
Witnessed the ways of men in other places.”
His aim is light from smoke, not smoke from fire,
To make the wonders he tells of—Scylla, Charybdis,
Antiphates, the Cyclops—shine more brightly.
To tell Diomedes’ story he doesn’t think
He has to start with the death of the hero’s uncle,
Or start, in telling about the Trojan War,
By telling us how Helen came out of an egg.
He goes right to the point and carries the reader
Into the midst of things, as if known already;
And if there’s material that he despairs of presenting
So as to shine for us, he leaves it out;
And he makes his whole poem one. What’s true, what’s invented,
Beginning, middle, and end, all fit together.
-Horace, ars poetica,Book III.
I know of no better words to start this blog which aim is to elucidate
and quench the void that now sits on the dark corners of the human skull.
I am sailing the same charts abusing the richness of never ending
superimpositions in time, accosting face to face the words of one
myriad of great minds that even though never abide the same time they
did consent the same interests.