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“... poetry, ‘greatness’ is not the aim or the criterion. The aim is not to emulate Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or anybody else; for if and so far as one is a poet these criteria and ambitions are nonsense. Poetry is in this respect like science: the aim of the true poet is not to be a ‘great poet’, but to make a contribution to poetry: merely to say the ...”

“... bottom a deep religious melancholy, to divert the shocking thoughts of which he is now translating Homer. He has been woefully deranged – in a strait waistcoat – and now is sometimes so ill that they take away his shoebuckles, that he may have nothing within his reach with which he can hurt himself. It seems he apprehends himself to be in a state of ...”

“... taken it from all the World’. Such statements, frequently co-existing with fervid assertions of Homer’s greatness, were a common critical manoeuvre to dissociate the poetry of the epic from its morality. A comment in the Spectator stated that Achilles was ‘Morally Vicious, and only Poetically Good’. Neither Dryden, nor Pope after him, was deterred by ...”

“... morality are not Poetry but Philosophy.’ Or, as he expresses it in his engraved manifesto ‘On Homer’s Poetry’: ‘Unity and Morality are secondary considerations [in art] & belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry.’ Blake thought the Bible the greatest literary work of the ‘Western tradition’, but he did not therefore see it as work which was free ...”

“... translation. Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920) – a work based on Wendell’s comparative literature course at Harvard – she characteristically reports to Berenson that the first thing she did was glance at the bibliography (‘they tell so much in such books!’), and was ...”

“... No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer, Sophocles, Molière, Racine, Sydney [sic], Spenser, or Shakespeare. Yet even the impeccable Lord Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, confessed to having cried – blubbered, boohooed, snuffled and sighed – over the death of Little Nell in The Old ...”

“... with ‘our desolate concrete plain’. The gist seems to be that the poet will never be Dante or Homer, only a philosopher of captions. This is clear despite the bodged dovetailing of ship and concrete plain. The final line of the poem (‘That pain is the one immortal gift of our stewardship’) relates to this presumably by the menial role of steward in ...”

“... Most of its members had most probably never heard of him. When Vico’s theories about Homer came to the notice of the Homeric scholar F.A. Wolf, and Vico’s writings on early Rome to that of the great Roman historian Niebuhr, these eminent men were not pleased. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. At least Vico, whatever his other anxieties, had ...”

“... of Greek and Latin literature. The highest standards are set not by the English poets but by Homer, Virgil and Dante. If anything deserves to be part of the school curriculum merely because of its contribution to our cultural heritage it is Latin, which until recently was a requirement for university entrance. The intellectual shallowness of the ...”

“... belong naturally to the situation. Thompson reports the case in 1823 of an ex-soldier called John Homer, who had maltreated his wife and forced her against net will to be bought out by her own brother. He then thought this entitled him to marry again, and was transported for bigamy. Life’s little ironies also produced a wife-purchaser called Thomas Hardy in ...”

“... as often as he compliments them. When he arrives in Limbo, its five canonical poets – Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan – welcome him as the sixth and implicitly greatest of their band, since he alone will be saved. The artist Oderisi, moralising about the transience of fame, notes that ‘one Guido [Cavalcanti] has taken from the other ...”

“... the effect of almost any orthodoxy is to hide this, and pretend that everybody ought to be like Homer or Dr Leavis.’ One of the most effective ways of creating an orthodoxy, as Leavis at least seems to have known, is to identify an enemy: the pretence that everybody should be like X always involves the assumption that they must hate Y, be as unlike Y as ...”

“... instinctively by Plato, this greatest enemy of art that Europe has yet produced. Plato contra Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism – there the ‘otherworldly one’ with the best of wills, the great slanderer of life; here its involuntary deifier, golden nature. I need hardly remind anyone what kind of future is being prepared, in ...”

“... great foremothers (inspired, perhaps, by the cadences of Brittain’s prose: ‘From the days of Homer the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women have ... been unsung’); and that triumphant reissue in the 1980s of all Holtby’s works as Virago Modern Classics. And now this biography, sharp, sensitive and ...”

“... novelist. If poverty were to force him to sell his books, he still would keep just a few: Moses, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles – and Richardson. The intensity of this admiration was surely rooted in Diderot’s recognition in Richardson’s fiction of what he himself could not manage: the density of scruples, the faith in psychological complexity, the ...”