The poem of the Greeks

In his book "Poetry of the Greeks," "Mohammed bin Saleh" selects from Greek poetry products of poets from the pre-Socratic period and presents them to the Arab reader to represent a return to the time when ancient Greek poetry flourished by poets such as Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, and others. The book is filled with poems of these giants, with the translator introducing each of these poets. In his introduction to this book, Mohammed bin Saleh admits that "it is an adventure that is not free from confusion for its owner, for it is so because it deals with images of 'creating meaning' that are very old," explaining how their creators came into the world, how they intended their stay in the world, and what their ambitions established, whether in liberation or alienation, in order to defend their poetry. These images are highly tense because they originate from the essence of anxiety, as Bin Saleh says. He also considers that there are three signs that may be sufficient to understand what distinguished Greek poetry and what made it influential to the point of merging and imitation, becoming the model, standard, and reference. The three signs are: its very natural development, likened to the body in its healthy transformation—childhood, youth, maturity, and then collapse—and its ability to evoke the personal individual and elevate it to the universal self. The third is that poetry is the most beautiful embodiment of standing in the most intense moments of tension, a stance of the self planted in the soil of contentment without ceasing to embrace the absolute. Among the poets whose poems are included in these products are: Archilochus, Callinus, Mimnermus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Alpheus, and others...