Concept
Geoffrey Kirk
Overview
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, ((1921-12-03)3 December 1921 – (2003-03-10)10 March 2003) was a British classicist who served as the 35th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. He published widely on pre-Socratic philosophy and the work of the Greek poet Homer, culminating in a six-volume philological commentary on the Iliad published between 1985 and 1993.
Born into a middle-class family in Nottingham, he began studying classics at Clare College, Cambridge but joined the Royal Navy during World War II. He was deployed to the Aegean Sea as part of the Levant Schooner Flotilla and distinguished himself through his command of modern Greek. His service, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, became the basis for his 1997 memoir Towards The Aegean Sea.
Kirk began his career as a lecturer and fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in the 1950s. He also held professorships at Yale and Bristol University. In 1974, having gained a reputation as a leading Hellenist through the publication of his first major study (Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments, 1954), he succeeded Denys Page as the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. After his retirement in 1983, he dedicated himself to his Iliad commentary but began to suffer from depressive illness.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Homer's poetry is what is called epic poetry, that is, it tells about heroes and heroic actions. The Iliad and Odyssey are the first and greatest of epic poems. In all ages since Homer's time, scholars have agreed in declaring them to be the finest poetic productions of human genius. No nation in the world has ever produced poems so beautiful or so perfect.
Michael Clarke, The Story of Troy
States what Geoffrey Kirk is.
Each claimed the honour. And if, indeed, such an accident of chance confers an honour upon a town, then the birthplace of the Greatest Poet of all time should be a place of pilgrimage. For, among the weavers of Epos, Drama, and Romance, he who was called Melesegenes is first of all and wears an imperishable crown. For 3000 years his fame has streamed down the ages. The world has changed. Great empires have risen…
Guy Thorne, The Adventures of Ulysses the Wanderer
Close in meaning to Geoffrey Kirk; the term itself is not named.
At the same time the artist belongs only to his own century, and it is in the ethical customs, modes of conception, and generally the intellectual outlook of that he lives. The Homeric poems Homer, to take him for once as the individual creator of both "Iliad" and "Odyssey," may have actually lived through or he may not; but in any case they are at least four hundred years later[391] than the time of the Trojan war…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
Close in meaning to Geoffrey Kirk; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Geoffrey Kirk
Related ideas
- Gregory Vlastos
- The Independent
- Greek language
- Artist
- Homer
- Heraclitus
- Bachelor of Arts
- Harvard University
- The Guardian
- Plato
- University of California Press
- Reader (academic rank)
- University of Cambridge
- Fellow of the British Academy
- Pre-Socratic philosophy
- United Kingdom
- Trinity College, Cambridge
- University of California, Berkeley
- World War II
- Yale University
- United States
- Cambridge
- The Times
- British undergraduate degree classification
Place in the tradition
Part of Anaxagoras.