Michael Longley: Argos

Relationship to Classical text  Odyssey 17.291 ff

Classical/post-Classical intertexts One of several poems in Longley’s Gorse Fires that uses episodes from the Odyssey to address ideas of ‘home’ and relationships. The others are ‘Laertes’, ‘Anticleia’, ‘Eurycleia’, ‘Tree-House’, all of which play on Homeric recognition scenes, in contrast to the violence enacted in the house which is treated in ‘The Butchers’.

Comment See: S. Broom, ‘Learning about Dying: Mutability and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley’  New Hibernia Review Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 94-112 esp. p. 108.