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"Here, readily available for the first time in many years, and I think, for the first time in a cheap edition, is one of the great masterpieces of English poetry. Not just one of the great masterpieces of translation, though it is certainly that; but one of the most sustained flights of invention, clarity, and vividness that English poetry has to show."

Philip Hensher, Spectator, 07/20/1996

"Yet this great poem has not been available for use in classrooms, or in modest libraries, since the great Twickenham Edition of it is cruelly expensive. Steven Shankman, a professor of English and classics at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and director of the Oregon Humanities Center, remedies that shameful neglect with a new Pope's 'Iliad' ('The Iliad of Homer Translated by Alexander Pope,' Penguin), completely re-editing the poem from Pope's last published edition (th Twickenham works from the first edition), modernizing the spelling and--most important--including Pope's extensive notes, which show how carefully Pope weighed the possible meanings of the original. The retention of Pope's punctuation is less helpful than it might at first seem. Though he was careful about it, he was working with 18th-century conventions and his audience's knowledge of the heroic couplet's possibilities. The modern reader will not readily perceive the degree of pause Pope was indicating with the onward flow of his lines. The thing that best distinguishes this from all other translations of Homer is that it alone equals the original in its ceaseless pour of verbal music. When Pope's contemporaries praised him for his ''numbers,'' they were referring not to the fairly obvious metrical system of the heroic couplet but to the euphony he achieved within its constraints. The relatively enclosed nature of the system concentrates attention on every syllable in the line, on continual shifts in the position and degree of pause marked by metrical breaks (caesuras), on sound effects used to emphasize the careful alterations in word order. Dryden, working a generation earlier on his translation of Virgil, had complained that the raspy consonants of English denied him the smooth vowel effects of the ancient languages. Pope worked miracles in highlighting the play of vowels through his lines."

Garry Wills, New York Times Book Review, 06/01/1997

Iliad of Homer: The First, Second, and Third Cantos: Search Results