Confessions of a Modernist
(The following is an edited and expanded version of a talk I gave on May 27, 2025, at “Promethean Fire: Stealing from the Classics,” a panel chaired by Joyce Wilson at the 2025 Poetry by the Sea Conference. Bruce Bennett, Julia Griffin, and Linda Stern also spoke.)
Ever since my early years as a poet, I’ve seen the classics through a modernist lens. To be sure, my first encounters with the gods and their minions—via the parts of Edith Hamilton’s and Bullfinch’s collections of Greek and Roman myths I read in high school—were mildly pleasurable, if largely dry.
Odysseus and Penelope Reunited by Newell Convers (after) Wyeth.
More notably, I took a third of a semester of Latin (our large public high school was on a trimester system). I received a grade of about 40 percent on the Latin regents exam, a score which was at the top of the class. Our teacher graded on a curve because of the difficulty of learning the rudiments of the language in a few weeks.
Nevertheless, a faint sense of the syntax did take root in my brain, as well as the knowledge that all Gaul is divided into three parts.
Much more thrilling was a course in Modern English and American Literature I took in my senior year. The authors we studied became greater deities to me than Zeus and Athena and Apollo and Dionysus. This was the late 1960s, and the modern and contemporary writers who could chime with the zeitgeist of those vibrant times stirred my soul then and continue to do so.
“About suffering they were never wrong,” Auden wrote of the Old Masters, seeming righter than they were, more classical than the classics. Eliot’s patient etherized upon a table cut right to the quick of a nation mired in an unjust war. This was no country for old men, Yeats counseled, bidding our dawning generation into the fields of glory. Similarly stirring was the prose of his countryman James Joyce, especially in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, whose protagonist Stephen Dedalus, who wrote of the will “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
Joyce derived the name Dedalus from Daedalus, the mythological Greek artificer who fashioned the Labyrinth of Crete and the wings his son Icarus deployed to dire excess. One important aspect of Ezra Pound’s poetic dictum to writers to “make it new” was to make the classics come alive again in the modern age.
Following that route, I formed in my college days a much stronger, if indirect, relationship with the classics than I had in high school—a bond that has continued to inspire me to this very moment. In Joyce’s novel Ulysses, I discovered a way of writing I could use to frame and inform a single, representative day very much like the present.
Homer, by way of Joyce, was one of the inspirations for “Claims of Home” the title poem of a collection published by Dos Madres Press in 2011. It’s a dramatic monologue spoken by an old shopkeeper who encounters Odysseus after his long years of exile.
In “Claims of Home,” I used the Latin name “Ulysses” rather than “Odysseus.” A case could be made that I should have used the Greek name. After all, The Odyssey, the overt source of my poem’s story, was composed in Greek.
But my poem is patently not a translation. Rather, it’s a contemporary poem. As such, I invoke the name of Joyce’s masterwork rather than Homer’s. Evidence that the poem partakes of Joycean modernism, in which all ages are contemporaneous, comes in the metaphor in the poem’s third line.
Here, the shopkeeper describes the battle-scarred Ulysses as being “smudged like a burnt tin can just plunked ashore.” Were he truly a denizen of classical times, there would be no tin cans.
My other major poetic guide to the classics was the poetry and literary thinking of Pound, and a major influence on Pound’s profound lifework, the modernist epic called The Cantos, was Homer.
Pound begins the work with a loose version of a 1538 Latin translation of The Odyssey by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus. The Anglo-Saxon alliterative sound of Pound’s verse, on full display here, is stirring. Canto I, which recounts the journey of Odysseus and his crew to the land of the dead, begins:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Since I first read and heard these lines (Pound is thrilling to hear online), I’ve often felt as if the authentic voice of poetic tradition was speaking directly to me.
For a long time, I wrote under the sway of Pound and Joyce, and the Greek and Latin classics they foregrounded for me. Later, however, I allowed another classical language and culture into my poetic orbit, a language and culture I had learned as boy: prayerbook Hebrew.
In connection with a project at my synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ), Rabbi Julie Schonfeld urged me to try to incorporate my native Judaism into my poetic practice. Submerged in modernism and English and American poetry as I was, opening my poetry to this important part of my life was something I hadn’t considered before.
But at the rabbi’s suggestion, I began to study the work of the Hebrew Golden Age poets of medieval Spain. Broadly speaking, I found the Spanish Golden Age an appealing era, a rare historical period in which Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in relative harmony, influencing each other intellectually and artistically.
Radiating a rich cultural mélange that included biblical text and commentary, erotic verse, drinking songs, and Aristotelian philosophy, the poetry of Judah Halevi, Solomon Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra, and others melded Hebrew words with Arabic rhythms.
Having studied Chaucer and, through Pound, the Provençal troubadours, I felt a kinship with the Golden Age poets, and their Judaism felt like home to me. Armed with my rudimentary Hebrew and some translations, I did a few imitations of their poems.
In the course of my research, I discovered The Jews of Moslem Spain by Eliyahu Ashtor, a book that rendered the culture and economics of that world in vivid detail. Ashtor’s descriptions of the hustle and bustle of the marketplace, the shops and the food, were especially inspiring, and I began a sequence of poems set in that time and place.
After writing a few of them, however, I felt that the historical material was too remote to make for good poetry in English. They needed what T.S. Eliot called an objective correlative, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” the poet seeks to evoke in the reader. I needed an objective correlative for the feeling of linguistic homecoming I was experiencing.
About that time, a friend of mine spoke to me with great enthusiasm about a Monteverdi opera he had just seen, The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland.
Especially profound and exciting to him, and to me, was the story of the return of Ulysses to Penelope after his long years in exile. A light went off in my head: This might be the correlative I was looking for.
Serendipitously, I had recently written an abbreviated English version of a poem by the modern Israeli poet Haim Gouri about Odysseus’s return. Reading Gouri’s poem in the original Hebrew had been a revelation for me. Here, in the language of my ancestors, was the hero of a poem that was an epitome of what we think of as classical.
And here, in Hebrew, I was able to read and pronounce a name transliterated as “Odisase.” Odysseus.
Like the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, I had returned to my linguistic and poetic origins. The objective correlative of my poem in Hebrew became the scene from Homer as rendered by Gouri. Here is my“Odisase”:
David M. Katz
Odisase
After the Hebrew of Haim Gouri
"My tired heart," the wanderer said to himself,
Returning to his mother waters,
The same fish and grass. The sun was different.
They gathered around him, chittering
Like quizzical birds, vacant-eyed,
Mumbling in a half-familiar language.
They didn't know him.
The wanderer turned, in the weakening light,
Burning his face in the sea.
He could reconnoiter the sky.
The old words were there,
Their sounds like the beginnings of rain.