Pindar's Poetics of Immortality

"In this book, Asya Sigelman offers a new approach to the odes, exploring the fact that Pindar's language and imagery suggest that the athlete's victory is only a weaker version of the poet's immortalizing feat. Examining several central Pindaric images, Sigelman shows that they are fundamentally reflexive, structured as expressions of poetic creativity engaged in a perpetual synthesis of intra-poetic time-of the unity of the past, present, and future of the world of Pindar's song. As the book's case studies of several of the odes demonstrate, this synthesis is key to Pindar's notion of immortalization and constitutes the central poetic subject of Pindar's song which underlies and informs its praise of the victorious athlete"--