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“... the oracle; or a footprint in a cave in the Auvergne, or a lateen sail of a Nile riverboat; or Homer, who is repeatedly and lovingly invoked or remembered. Wonder is Golding’s mode of knowledge. ‘The bare act of being is an outrageous improbability,’ he says, describing himself as a man prone to ‘a sense of continual astonishment’ – rather like ...”

“... poet Angelbert declares his devotion to the emperor by saying: Vatis Homerus amat David – ‘Homer the poet [i.e. Angelbert!] loves David.’ The admiration of these poets for their Classical predecessors, especially Virgil, can lead to something little better than pastiche (though that may itself be effective, as in the mock-heroic ‘Battle of the ...”

“... build his novel, A Vision of Battlements, on a groundbass, as Joyce had built on the groundbass of Homer, so he chose the Aeneid, and called his hero Sergeant Richard Ennis, the name based on Virgil’s hero, the rank on that of J.B. Wilson. (Much later an American researcher pointed out to him that ‘R. Ennis’ was ‘sinner’ spelt backwards, and Burgess ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... primitive or naive; and so it is, if we believe E.A. Havelock in his Preface to Plato, who found Homer paratactic whereas Plato set us on the opposite course, hypotaxis, which has governed us ever since. Citing Homer suggests that parataxis is peculiarly fitted to narrative, and Browning, quite apart from the primitivism ...”

“... Homeric mythology. He conceives his Homeric metaphors when a Greek woman shows him a small bust of Homer and tells him the modern Greek for the ancient Greek’s name: Omeros. The bust reminds him of Seven Seas, blind St Lucian storyteller; and the name summons images of the St Lucian shoreline. By way of treatment, he roves in an almost disembodied state ...”

“... essays on ‘the phenomenon of secondary narrative’ with attention to authors from Homer, Chaucer and Charlotte Yonge to Donald Barthelme and John Barth. A number of the contributors focus on 18th-century fiction, others on 20th-century film, two places where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold ...”

“... Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first mistress. ‘Hugo called Virgil the moon of Homer; when I flatter myself, I tell myself that I shall perhaps one day be B’s.’ I like to think, mostly on the basis of conservatory gossip but also because of the ‘physical aversion’ to women Liszt keeps mentioning in his correspondence, that this ...”

“... juxtaposition of ancient and modern motifs – Helen of Troy and Maud Gonne – as in ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ and ‘No Second Troy’? Or has Eliot something else in mind as marking the relation between Yeats’s poems and Ulysses? The second matter arises from William Empson’s work on Ulysses. I’ve never seen his interpretation discussed.* He takes ...”

“... effective than Kinglake’s stealth. If Defoe was Borrow’s favourite writer, Kinglake’s was Homer. His sense of honour derived from the Homeric heroes, but without their weeping, their boasting, their punitive rage. He made a distinction between the military tragedy of the Iliad, which he thought the more ‘serious’ book, and the more feminine ...”

“... afternoons on the river, or evenings playing music with friends, he was able to ‘swill and booze Homer until the world contained no Homer that he had not read’– and the same went for Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Cicero and Dante, as well as the main authorities in modern and contemporary philosophy. He earned a reputation ...”

“... work cut out. But rises to the occasion in, for example, the version of Poem 78: Sleeplessness. Homer. The sails tight. I have the catalogue of ships half read: That file of cranes, long fledgling line that spread And lifted once over Hellas, into flight. Like a wedge of cranes into an alien place – The god’s spume foaming in the prince’s hair ...”

“... were profoundly different from those in which I have been brought up.’ His own judgment of Homer, he wrote, took its bearings from the Blaskets and the ‘ragged peasants’ he met. There, he said, ‘it was as though Homer had come alive.’Robin Flower, another English scholar who came to the Blaskets (in ...”

“... the poetry, ranging from a line-by-line scrutiny of one of Tennyson’s experiments in translating Homer, through a review of ‘touches of language, imagery, and thought ... probably taken consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously from Greek and Roman writers’, to the influence of the Theocritan Idylls and a detailed discussion of ‘Ulysses’ and its ...”

“... life, when I look there: and life is painful. I always think of this when I read the Odyssey – Homer makes the surviving Greeks, whenever they refer to Troy, just say of it ‘At Troy, where the Greeks suffered so.’ Yet all their life was in that ten years at Troy. ‘Lucca, where I suffered so.’2 Two years later, in the remarkable diary entries found ...”