Ian Swain
Home Department: Classics
My interests largely spring out of a fascination with lyric poetry, its history and theory, and how we think about its boundaries as a genre. I am especially interested in the native tensions between text and oral performance that pervade different song cultures. This has led me to a fascination with Homer, archaic Greek lyric (Sappho, Anacreon, etc.), and Greek poetry's transition to the Hellenistic period, especially the Idylls of Theocritus, whose poems have made me curious about the strange relation that the pastoral genre has to lyric. I especially enjoy studying the poetry of the English Renaissance and its writers' reception of ancient Greek literature, and I give special attention to the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney and the ambitions of his (now cobwebbed over) Arcadia. Above all, I care about the magic of lyric poems and their diversely joyous, rhetorical, hypnotic, and ecstatic potentials.