Pope's Iliad

This volume presents a generous selection from Pope's celebrated translation of Homer's "Iliad," edited and arranged so as to concentrate on the central core of the story and thus to be readable as a continuous narrative. Also included is a selection of the best of Pope's notes to his own translation; these illuminate his principles as a translator and transmit his intelligent and penetrating assessments of the "Iliad's" poetic qualities. Readers of both Homer and Pope will derive great benefit from this edition. On the one hand it enables students of English literature to sample a neglected poem written by Pope at the height of his powers, once thought to contain some of his finest writing and deepest poetic thoughts about "Man and Nature." Students of the Classics, on the other hand, will be able to study in detail the response of one of its most distinguished admirers to the greatest poem of ancient Greece. Felicity Rosslyn's introduction discusses the main themes of the poem and establishes Pope's unique qualifications as a translator of Homer. There is a glossary of characters, a new (2002) list of further reading, and editorial annotations to difficult references in the text or to passages in other literary works inspired by Homer's epic.