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“... sort of mistake many poets have made, most famously Keats in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, where he gave Cortez, not Balboa, credit for discovering the Pacific. Nothing in Hecht’s poems reveals so well what, however artfully concealed, lay beneath the surface of his work: guilt, self-loathing, pettiness.Though Hecht’s poems often ...”

“... Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes deployed, as well as Jasper Johns, for his painting of the United States that is and is not ...”

“... in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in all the variations of his style and the different modulations of his numbers ... not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the very cast of his periods’), his own Iliad would give you rather a ...”

“... head as well, and here Motion depends on Marjorie Levinson. ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ elicits various statements from Motion: let me isolate them and respond to them one by one. First, the sonnet is ‘a poem about exclusion as well as inclusion’: ‘Its title suggests that Keats felt he had come late to high culture (it is “On First ...”

“... in the flesh. Pushkin, for instance, initially viewed the Greeks as the ‘legal heirs’ of Homer and Themistocles. But, following an unhappy encounter with the Greek merchants of Chishinau in Bessarabia, he wrote that it was ‘unforgivable childishness’ that enlightened Europe should be raving about ‘a nasty people made up of bandits and ...”

“... Classical and modern learning, literary debris (‘winedark’ and ‘slouching’ from Yeats, or Homer and Yeats if you’d rather), the Shakespearean puns on place-names, the opposition of French chic and US cool; the anxious, dreary and deluded male protagonists; the way the whole literal scene seems forever on the point of dissolving into wicked ...”

“... In the institutions of literary studies, it is often the authors about whom the least is known (Homer, Shakespeare) that are the most canonical. Was this what Mallarmé understood when he yearned for a text speaking on its own? Why is authority tied to the erasure of particularity? Why are some forms of particularity easier to erase than others? If these ...”

“... of the Bible, very much as they can be against comparable nit – picking in the study of Homer. Yet, says Josipovici, it is time for literary critics to go a step further. In the end, the Bible is not literature after all, if by ‘literature’ we mean texts marked by closure and well – rounded form. Its untidiness and open-endedness are ...”

“... in Algiers reminded him not of the Arabian Nights or similar Orientalist fantasies, but rather of Homer and accounts of women spinning wool or embroidering in a gynaeceum. Porterfield, however, unimpressed by what the painter actually says, suggests that Delacroix’s painting owed more to Orientalist cliché than it did to direct observation and that he ...”

“... literary) class came from country homes; towns were fought for; cities were bombed. From Homer to Owen the poetry of battle had obeyed the unity of place, been centred in a field of encounter. The language evolved by the Great War poets, with its dependence on the local and the particular, was not responsive to the concept of total war, the mobile ...”

“... I think it can be. In his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, which contained versions of Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer, Dryden wrote: ‘Troilus and Cressida was also written by a Lombard author; but much amplified by our English Translatour, as well as beautified; the Genius of our Countrymen in general being rather to improve an ...”

“... journeys, the folios of the Society of Dilettanti and Wood’s essay on the original genius of Homer. During the Seventies, Sir William Hamilton, who had personally taken part in the excavations, did much to make the new discoveries known. After England’s isolation from the Continent was ended by Napoleon’s defeat, interest in the buried cities ...”

“... remedy.’ Little wonder his magnum opus was to be entitled ‘The Task’; no wonder translating Homer was so attractive. Pursuing ‘the jingling art’ for ‘amusement’, and in order to keep madness and self-destruction at bay, came readily to this Buckinghamshire Sheherazade. Lisping in numbers since his schooldays, he could now repay his ...”

“... writing another history of Alexander was to provide finally a text worthy of his achievement, as Homer had for Achilles: ‘I do not think I am unworthy of the first place in Greek language as Alexander was in arms.’ Alexander was something of an obsession. In one extraordinary dream Aristides imagines finding a double tomb with one half set aside for ...”

“... The journalist might have slaughtered him. It was to sound like a scholar that he said: ‘I read Homer as I read Racine.’ In the whole of Paris there are not even twenty people who are that fluent, and some of them do it for a living. But when you are dealing with people who have never studied the aforementioned Greek they will believe you. It reminds me ...”