ABSTRACT
Callimachus, representative poet of ancient Alexandria, is a pioneer of cool allusion and coded distance. Alexandrian man is the inventor, the abstractor, the calculator, the scholar, who believes he can guide life by 'science' and correct the world by reason and knowledge. The Alexandrian enterprise and Callimachus' part in it have been revalued in a major study by Alan Cameron, who has identified a long series of items of literary history and literary interpretation on which current opinion is open to question. Moreover, in Callimachus, as in T. S. Eliot, there is, certainly, a powerful concern with idiom, in the guise of a preoccupation with literary allegiance. Eliot's poetic investigations of actuality and experience in later poems like Four Quailets could hardly be more directly un-Alexandrian in their total commitment to such large issues - and Eliot's poetic 'solutions' are, at most, evasively optimistic.
