Introduction

A major theme of this course is the Descent of the Western Literary Tradition. To understand how we got where we are today is to understand how we may become better writers. The writers’ craft, like any other, first entered the world in a primitive form and evolved over time. We will think in epochal terms of our craft and consider its roots going back at least five thousand years. Imagine a very early document recording a storyteller’s version of an ancient myth or legend. Think about where the storyteller might have gotten it. We may safely infer that when writing first appeared, those scribes were not suddenly inspired to create a mythology to record in writing. The stories had an ancestry. We can study ancient art and pictographs to get a sense of the old stories, but it was not until the invention of writing that they were recorded in a form to which all literate successors would have access. An excursion through the chronicles of history invariably takes the intellectual pilgrim from one literary landmark to another.

The journey of the keepers of our cultural heritage may have begun 20,000 years ago. Some of the transitions were smooth and relatively seamless while others were marked by epochal advances taking place over historically brief periods. We assume that as soon as men began to communicate through the faculty of speech, they began to tell stories. The oral tradition that began with the invention of speech gave rise to a rich oeuvre transmitted from one generation to the next, with each storyteller adding to, taking away from, or otherwise embellishing the tales. Only by the cleverest philological detective work can we infer what came before successive versions. The invention of writing some four thousand years ago changed all that. Once written, the document does not change, only subsequent copies or versions of it.

The next epochal shift in the Western literary tradition appeared during the period of the sixth through the fourth centuries BCE in Greece. Fifth century Athens, in particular, put a stamp on western literature that reverberates to this day.

C.G Starr put it this way: To describe in measured tones the Greek achievements in the fifth century B.C. is well nigh impossible, for never in the history of the world have so few people done so much in the space of two or three generations. Impressive in itself, the classic era was also a seminal influence for all later western civilization.

In that century Athens gave rise to our Western literary tradition through a unique gathering of dramatists and teachers not seen since. The great achievement of the preceding half millennium that made this flowering possible was the development of the written word. No longer was culture transmissible only through storytellers and artifacts. Armed with a written language and dramatic genius, the likes of the scribe or scribes we call Homer as well as Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, among a host of others less familiar, laid the foundation for all future generations to write down their stories and plays and record their narratives for all time.

Fifth-century Athens segued into the fourth and gave us Plato and Aristotle, who preserved the teachings of Socrates and elaborated their own. These were brilliant men who laid the foundations of Western philosophy and political thought.

Imagine that brief span during which the Western intellectual tradition was codified and expanded. Is there another two hundred year period that can compare to it? I doubt it. But this is not to say that the great locomotive of Western thought, so set in motion, chugged its way through the millennia without further significant influences.

Later epochal events we will consider took place in sixteenth and seventeenth century England giving us the works of Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Christian Bible.

In 1603, the reign of Elizabeth yielded to that of the eponymous James I of England who gave us the KJV. These were the decades of Shakespeare and Milton, Ben Jonson and John Donne; of Rembrandt, El Greco, Rubens, and Caravaggio, of John Dowland, Montverde, and William Byrd; of  Francis Bacon, Pascal and Descartes; of Galileo, Kepler, and William Harvey. In fifty years, English language, drama, poetry, painting, science, and music underwent dramatic advancement.