Volume 33, Number 4 · March 13, 1986
Homer Comes Home
By Oliver Taplin
Homer
by Paolo Vivante
Yale University Press, 218 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad
by Seth L. Schein
University of California Press, 223 pp., $22.00
A new surge of interest in the poems of Homer, especially the Iliad, has gathered pace during the last dozen years or so. In midcentury, say between 1935 and 1970, it was outsiders, rather than professional scholars, who were the champions of Homer. John Cowper Powys in The Pleasures of Literature (1938), a collection of some of the lectures he had been giving for years in the United States, insisted that 'none who has read Homer can say that swords and spears and chariots and horses are the only poetry he knows,' and that the poet lavished no less care on 'the recurrent amenities of life within our gates, the preparation of fire and food…the handiwork of women….' Powys, characteristically, claimed to have discovered the secret:
Review, 4706 words
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