Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its ‘nobility’, as has everyone ever since — but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its ‘bright unbearable reality’ (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem’s energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer’s extended similes and on the brief ‘biographies’ of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably – and unforgotten – in the copiousness of Homer’s glance. ‘The Iliad is an oral poem.

Format: Paperback
Published: UK, 2012
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Pages: 96
Language: English
ISBN 13: 9780571274185
ISBN 10: 0571274188