The Classic Poets

"Then there was neither Aught nor Nought, no air nor sky beyond.
What covered all? Where rested all? In watery gulf profound?
Nor death was then, nor deathlessness, nor change of night and day.
That One breathed calmly, self-sustained; nought else beyond it lay."

From: The Song of Creation ~ Rig Veda

The earliest poetry is shrouded in the mists of time, we cannot be certain of dates from antiquity, but amongst the earliest poetry we have the immortal utterances of the Vedic Seers who offered eternal spiritual truths which still resonate today.

The other great ancient civilisation was that of Egypt with its rich tapestry of mysticism. However this ancient Egyptian poem speaks of the One God, in language reminiscent of the Bible and the Qu'ran.

God

GOD is the One everlasting,
perpetual, eternal, unending.
From endless time hath He been.
and shall be henceforth and for ever.

View: GOD is the One

Closer to 0 AD the early Chinese Poets Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu offered the enigmatic classics of Taoism (Daoism) The Tao Te Ching in particular is one of the great spiritual texts.

In ancient Greece the great Homeric poets of Homer and Virgil produced the epics such as the Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid. This early poetry was the cornerstone of Western Literature.

Indian Poets / Poetry BC

• The Upanishads
• The Bhagavad Gita
• Lord Buddha
• Sumangalamata (6th Century BC)

The Classic Poets BC (Homeric Poets)

• Aeschylus (? 5th Century BC)
• Virgil (?80BC- )
• Homer (? uncertain could be 11th Century BC)
• Ovid (43 BC - )
• Horace (65 - 8 BC)

Chinese Poets BC

• Lao Tzu (approc 600 BCE)
• Confucius (551-479 BC)
• Chuang Tzu (370 - 268 BC)

• Virgil
• Homer
• Ovid
• Horace
• Beowulf

In the traditional sense, a classic, is an old author canonised by admiration, and an authority in his particular style. At first the only true classics for the moderns were the ancients. The Greeks, by peculiar good fortune and natural enlightenment of mind, had no classics but themselves. They were at first the only classical authors for the Romans, who strove and contrived to imitate them. After the great periods of Roman literature, after Cicero and Virgil, the Romans in their turn had their classics, who became almost exclusively the classical authors of the centuries which followed.