and even the ludicrous Comte de Saint-Victor. Homer, the most miraculous and ancient of survivals in our culture, comes from a time of unadorned encounter with the realities of existence. It is absurd now to call the sea ‘unharvestable’, but it is also beautiful and moving. For all of Saint-Victor’s despised sententiousness, he was right in this. Homer’s simplicity, his undeniably straight look, is a form of revelation. Its nakedness is its poetry. There is nothing here of ornamentation or prettiness, and that is its value. ‘Each time I put down the Iliad,’ the American poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote towards the end of his life,
after reading it again in some new translation, or after reading once more the somber splendor of the Greek, I am convinced, as one is convinced by the experiences of a lifetime, that somehow, in a way beyond the visions of artistry, I have been face to face with the meaning of existence. Other works of literature give this insight, but none so powerfully, so uncontaminated by evasion or subterfuge.
This book is driven by a desire to find the source of that directness and that understanding.
* * *
In the early autumn of 1816, John Keats was not yet twenty-one. He had been writing poetry for two years, living with other medical students in ‘a jumbled heap of murky buildings’ just off the southern end of London Bridge, working as a ‘dresser’ – a surgeon’s assistant – in Guy’s Hospital. He was miserable, good at his job but hating it, out of sorts with ‘the barbarous age’ in which he lived, filled with a hunger for life on a greater scale and of a deeper intensity than the ordinariness surrounding him could provide.
At school in Enfield, his headmaster’s son Charles Cowden Clarke, who had ambitions himself as a poet and littérateur, had introduced him to history and poetry, immersing him in Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. Clarke gave him the first volume of the great Elizabethan English epic, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and, as Clarke remembered later in life, Keats took to it
as a young horse would through a spring meadow – ramping! Like a true poet, too – a poet ‘born, not manufactured’, a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, ‘what an image that is – “sea-shouldering whales”!’
When Keats at this age saw the wind blowing across a field of barley still in the green, he jumped on a stile and shouted down at Clarke, ‘The tide! The tide!’ Here was a boy, born the son of a London ostler, hungry for depth, for a kind of surging reality, for largeness and otherness which only epic poetry could provide. Poetry for him, as Andrew Motion has said, was ‘both a lovely escape from the world and a form of engagement with it’. It was not about prettiness, elegance or decoration but, in Motion’s phrase, ‘a parallel universe’, whose reality was truer and deeper than anything in the world more immediately to hand. Poetry gave access to a kind of Platonic grandeur, an underlying reality which everyday material life obscured and concealed. It is as if Keats’s sensibility was ready for Homer to enter it, a womb prepared for conception. All that was needed was for Homer to flood into him.
Perhaps at Clarke’s suggestion, he had already looked into the great translation of Homer made by the young Alexander Pope between about 1713 and 1726, the medium through which most eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Englishmen encountered Homer. But it was a translation that came to be despised by the Romantics as embodying everything that was wrong in the culture of the preceding age: interested more in style than in substance, ridiculously pretty when the Homeric medium was truth, a kind of drawing-room Homer which had left the battlefield and the storm at sea too far behind.
Where, for example, Homer had said simply ‘the shepherd’s heart is glad’, Pope had written
The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight
Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.
From the point of view of the 1780s, Pope’s Homer was about as Homeric as a Meissen shepherdess with a lamb in her lap.
This wasn’t entirely fair to Pope. His preface to the Iliad, published in 1715, is one of the most plangent descriptions ever written in English of the power of the Homeric poems. Northern European culture had been dominated for too long by the processed and stable maturity of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Latin epic par excellence, written in about 20 BC. Homer represented an earlier stage in human civilisation, a greater closeness to nature, to the potency of the sublime, a form of poetry which was not to be admired from afar but which would bind up its reader or listener in a kind of overwhelming absorption in its world. ‘No man of true Poetical Spirit,’ the young Pope had written, ‘is Master of himself while he reads him; so forcible is the poet’s Fire and Rapture.’ Translation was not a calm carrying over of the meaning in Greek into the meaning in English, but a vision of the processes of the mind as a flaming crucible in which the sensibilities of translator and translated were fused into a new, radiant alloy.
Pope may have been the darling of the establishment. In his preface, he thanked a roll-call of the eighteenth-century British great – Addison, Steele, Swift, Congreve, a string of dukes, earls, lords and other politicians – but for all that, his entrancement with Homeric power is not in doubt. Homer was like nature itself. He was a kind of wildness, ‘a wild paradise’ in which, as the theory then was, the great stories and figures he described came into being.
What he writes is of the most animated Nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in Action … The Course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes,
They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it.
This inseparability of Homer and his world is what excited Pope. It seemed to him like a voice from the condition of mankind when it was still simple, quite different from ‘the luxury of succeeding ages’. Poetic fire was the essential ingredient. ‘In Homer, and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.’
Pope grasped the essential point: unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a pre-classic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.
Virgil bestows with a careful Magnificence: Homer scatters with a generous Profusion. Virgil is like a River in its Banks, with a gentle and constant Stream: Homer like the Nile, pours out his Riches with a sudden Overflow.
In this preface to the Iliad, Pope can lay claim to being the greatest critic of Homer in English. But what of his translation? Was he able to bear out this deep understanding of Homer’s ‘unaffected and equal Majesty’ in the translation he made? Perhaps not. Take for example a moment of passionate horror towards the end of the Iliad. For most of the poem Achilles has been in his tent, nursing his grievance and loathing against Agamemnon, but now that Patroclus, the man he loved, has been killed by Hector, Achilles is out to exact revenge. He is on his blood-run, gut-driven, pitiless, the force of destiny. Among his enemies on the field, he encounters a young Trojan and looks down on him with the vacancy of fate. The young warrior stares back up:
In vain his youth, in vain his beauty pleads:
In vain he begs thee, with a suppliant’s moan
To spare a form and age so like thy own!
Unhappy boy! no prayer, no moving art
E’er bent that fierce inexorable heart!
While yet he trembled at his knees, and cried,
