Anacreon

?572--?488 bc, Greek lyric poet, noted for his short songs celebrating love and wine

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Anacreon

(563–478 B.C.) Greek lyric poet who idealized the pleasures of love. [Gk. Lit.: Brewer Dictionary, 31]

See: Love

Anacreon

(563–478 B. C.) Greek lyric poet who praised the effects of wine. [Gk. Lit.: Brewer Dictionary, 31]

See: Wine

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Anacreon

Born about 570 B.C.; died about 487 B.C. Ancient Greek poet.

The basic motifs in Anacreon’s lyric poetry, of which only small fragments have been preserved, are sensual love, wine, and a carefree life. Poems of this style later became known as Anacreontic poems. A. S. Pushkin, L. A. Mei, and others translated Anacreon into Russian.

WORKS

[“Fragments.”] In Poetae melici graeci. Edited by D. Page. Oxford, 1962.
In Russian translation:
Anakreont: Pervoe polnoe sobr. ego soch. v perevodakh russkikh pisatelei. Edited by A. Tambovskii. St. Petersburg, [1896].
[“Fragmenty.”] In Grecheskaia epigramma.[Moscow, 1960.]

REFERENCE

Iarkho, V., and K. Polonskaia. Antichnaia lirika. Moscow, 1967.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Moore's interest in these Anacreontic themes is surprisingly close to the interest shown by Royalist poets under whom English Anacreontics originally flourished during the years of Civil War exile (these poets included Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Stanley, and Cowley).

See Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Sidney's Anacreontics," Review of English Studies 36 no.

Irish Melodies of Anacreontic Balladry

Kaske shows how another of Spenser's works, the anacreontics, relates to Spenser's marriage hymn: the anacreontics provide 'some sort of bridge from sonnets to epithalamion' through the 'dramatization [of] the discomforts of the lover as fiance; all of them are expressions of sexual frustration which are portrayed as resolved in the Epithalamion'.

Fielding's comic prose epithalamium in Joseph Andrews: A Spensarian imitation

Anacreontics spouted up in diverse European languages in part because they embodied a lyric spontaneity and desire not found in Pindar's more formally elaborate commissioned odes celebrating "shining goals," to use EBB's words in "Wine of Cyprus" (1.

The Anacreontic "becomes more shadowy in the romantic period," as Brown observes, although Byron and Coleridge wrote Anacreontics and the language of Keats's odes--a poet beloved by EBB as well as Dickinson--is "heavily" suggestive of "the rhetoric of Anacreon." (23) As Judith Thompson's discoveries reveal, John Thelwall also wrote numerous Anacreontics.

Lyric tipplers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Wine of Cyprus," Emily Dickinson's "I taste a Liquor," and the transatlantic Anacreontic tradition

Marjorie Stone published an important, ambitious essay on a poem almost entirely overlooked in recent years, "Wine of Cyprus." "Lyric Tipplers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Wine of Cyprus,' Emily Dickinson's 'I taste a liquor,' and the Transatlantic Anacreontic Tradition," VP 54, no.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning