The Ancient Greek Mindset: Poetry and the Truth

As we continue our attempt to think outside of the modern mindset, as related in the previous blog, it would be well to turn to Ancient Greece. I don’t believe it’s by accident that Rimbaud’s poetic genius flourished with an eye towards Ancient Greece as related in his 1871 seer letter. Furthermore, I don’t believe it’s by accident that great poetry and great philosophy arose together at the same time and place that’s commonly referred to as the Golden Age of Greece. More than art, poetry can be about the truth and engender the positive emotion that promotes greater integrity of reason. With some correlation to Rimbaud’s seer letter, Edith Hamilton describes the ancient Greek mindset as follows, from her book, The Greek Way (an excerpt taken from a chapter about Plato, no less):

It is clear that in Greece the values were different from our own to-day. Indeed we are not able really to bring into one consistent whole their outlook upon life; from our point of view it seems to involve a self-contradiction. People so devoted to poetry as to make it a matter of practical importance must have been, we feel, deficient in the sense for what is practically important, dreamers, not alive to life’s hard facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Greeks were pre-eminently realists. The temper of mind that made them carve their statues and paint their pictures from the living human beings around them, that kept their poetry within the sober limits of the possible, made them hard-headed men in the world of every-day affairs. They were not tempted to evade facts. It is we ourselves who are the sentimentalist. We, to whom poetry, all art, is only a superficial decoration of life, made a refuge from a world too hard to face by sentimentalizing it. The Greeks looked straight at it. They were completely unsentimental.