On First Looking Into Homer's Odyssey: Exploring The Bard's Dramatic Artistry

The author of On First Looking into Homer's Odyssey reports of this work: My enthusiasm for the Homeric epics dates to 1933, when in Frank Durkee's sophomore English class in Somerville (New Jersey) High School, I was introduced to the Odyssey in the Butcher & Lang prose translation. We students had already been exposed to Classical mythology in the elementary grades, and I had read on my own Bulfinch's Age of Fable, a treasured birthday present. Mr. Durkee presented the Odyssey as a collection of fabulous adventures, and I read with excitement about the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis. In my late teens and early twenties I read and re-read the Iliad in various translations, eager to explore the events which preceded the Odyssey. In my mid-thirties, I undertook to master Classical Greek, impelled in great part by a desire to read Homer in the original. When I declared to Vera Lachmann, a Brooklyn College Classics professor who invited me to read Greek with her on Saturday mornings, that I was coming to believe that there was Homer and other literature, she exclaimed, "It's about time you came to that conclusion!" Returning to university in 1961 to pursue courses toward a doctorate, I exposed in my dissertation Byron's critique of the Homeric epics in his comic epic, Don Juan. Appointed in 1966 to found a Classics department at Brock University, a newly established Ontario institution, I developed an intensive survey course of Classical literature in translation (from which I hoped to recruit students for courses in Latin and Greek). The first day of class of the survey course, I would announce: "People think that if they can read a newspaper they know how to read, and, indeed, you may be able to read a bestseller with minimal effort, but the works we will be studying this year require a special effort, a special kind of reading. Masterworks like the Homeric epics are to be approached

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