“... that none of the creative arts reached perfection straightaway: There must have been poets before Homer, as we can tell from the songs sung at the banquets of the Phaeacians and of the suitors on Ithaca in the Odyssey. And where is our own ancient poetry ‘that once the Fauns and prophets sang’? … The Latin Odyssey is like some archaic sculpture by ...”

“... years. Pindar’s language is sometimes obscure to those who have not ventured beyond tragedy and Homer, since they need to look up rather more words; his thought is frequently compressed. For these reasons he has often been considered difficult; those of us who blame other people’s intellectual deficiencies, or the loss of background information, are ...”

“... Shakespearean aunt taught her to eat from fairy circles and how to name a tracehorse: Forrest or Homer – coins from the wordhoard of our tribe buried in the angelic angles around home: in Long Chase, the Top, the Forty-Acre, the Pikel. School spread on this the alphabet and the best lines of Scott, and a cousin from Australia showed a way to peel an orange ...”

“... alive rival him at this. (Odyssey, 19.282-6) It’s a panel on something improbable (Godard and Homer?) in a fluorescent salon of some city’s Palais des Congrès. After your overcrafted paper sinks to cool applause you watch the back of Margaret Drabble’s head let loose hooves and Styx and stories of supper to lope the room. Applause is warm. Q&A is ...”

“... was the first full-scale account, mentions in his opening chapter that Pound’s father, Homer, worked as an assistant assayer in the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Stock points out that in the 1890s the young Ezra ‘mixed with the assayers and drank in stories about “gold bricks”, which he still remembered in 1944 when he wrote his ...”

“... from Canto I: Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. This is a passage which won’t tell most readers much unless it is itself glossed by a real footnote, and which, even if it did, would act, not as an energising factual intervention of the kind McGann envisages for footnotes, but as part of the poem’s ...”

“... the States, intoxicating himself and his audience with large thoughts about Dante, Dostoevsky and Homer, while contrasting his subject-matter with his environment – years before he began forcing his physical and spiritual experiences into novels of British life. What happens in New York is that Richard takes up with an old flame, a dancer called Elise ...”

“... younger than Sappho and Alcaeus, from nearby Lesbos.It’s hard to overstate how completely Homer dominated Greek intellectual culture at this time. He was seen as the fount of all knowledge: not only myth, history and theology, but agriculture, navigation, geography, zoology, medicine, even cooking. Early Greek reverence for ...”

“... that the Greeks won at Troy and that Penelope was faithful to her husband because it pleased Homer to say so, but the facts are otherwise: E se tu vuoi che ’l ver non ti sia ascoso, tutta al contrario l’istoria converti: che i Greci rotti, e che Troia vittrice, e che Penelopea fu meretrice. If you wish the truth not to be hidden from you, turn the ...”

“... says the next couplet,             when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. There is a tacit transition in the narrative from critic’s law to Homeric poem, as though they, too, were much the same. The rules were Nature too: ‘To copy Nature is to copy Them.’ The sliding, whether cunning or ...”

“... with tanks). But even a tireless tale-teller at the top of the class must sleep (okay, so that was Homer!), and I imagine you flying high over the Atlantic, Prof, en route for Voshing’DC, forced even now to dream of what your next meal might be. ‘Fighters! Fellow writers!’ (Excited, your brows go into furrows like one of Huss’s diacritics ...) ‘Let ...”

“... I want to go alone,’ and They had let her. ‘They’ are Victorine’s oddly named parents, Homer and Allison L’Hommedieu, upper-middle-class denizens of a staid New England village. As official family changeling, Victorine will ignore them for much of the novel, even as her older brother, Costello (shy and broody and horny, ‘as if there were milk ...”

“... man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by Homer, ‘noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without volition, like a traffic light, every few pages of the Iliad, and, with greater ...”

“... in the First Cemetery at Athens adds the most Wagnerian touch of all. His statue, a volume of Homer in its hand, looks out from a classical temple atop a podium. Accompanied only by Sophia, he supervises the excavation of a resurrected Troy. The sides of the temple are adorned with reliefs from the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as other traditions that ...”

“... are very fine in themselves, since Longley is one of few contemporary poets who can capture Homer’s spare and unrelenting humanity, but their impact often depends on their positioning alongside other poems. The Stairwell (2014) – one of the loveliest collections of verse in the past decade, and probably the place to start if you’re unfamiliar with ...”