Riding the engine of syntax …

… A Paean to Craftsmanship | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Stallings’s Hesiod, in many ways, is closer to the jealous potters and weavers he describes at length than to the vision of the blind, inspired, Muse-led Homeric bard of lore. The substance from which he crafts poetry is more than breath. Like clay and cloth, it’s tangible: the new letters of the Phoenician alphabet introduced to Greece at the end of its illiterate “Dark Ages.” This is significant. “The early alphabet,” Stallings observes, “likes to declare ownership or belonging, and it speaks in the first person.” In Hesiod, for the first time, the alphabet’s two earliest uses converge: it proclaims ownership even as it records poetry.