Homer-Haunted

In Europe, history begins with Homer – an ancient, dead poet who might not even have existed; no other verse has ignited the imagination of so many writers and thinkers across so many millennia. This book will tell the story of how Homer, the most influential writer to have ever lived, came to haunt British culture (despite speaking no English).

Homer’s songs were probably first sung on the eastern edge of the Aegean – in what is now western Turkey – in the 8th century BC, but their influence has since spread across the entire world. Henry Power stalks the steps of twelve thinkers who have turned to Homer to find answers about their own voices and times. These include many of the most significant figures in the history of poetry in English: Alexander Pope, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ezra Pound, and Derek Walcott. Over the centuries these writers have reinvented Homer as a lofty ‘Prince of Poets’, as a wild prophet, as an angry pacifist, as a Celtic bard, and as a Caribbean fisherman. This book tells the story of these transformations, offering an unexpected new history of English literature and culture. It also asks: why Homer? What is it about these ancient poems that has spurred so much creativity and passion?

Even though they are so central to British culture (in the nineteenth-century, for instance, it was expected that the political leaders of the empire would know their Homer by heart), the world of the Homeric poems is a deeply alien one—violent, superstitious, and far earthier than many of the later cultures that adopted it. This book will show how their weird and unsettling aspects have found their way into the bloodstream of English-speaking nations, as successive writers have tried to capture the strange, lost music of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Henry has long been as haunted by Homer as his subjects – he’s been reading the epics almost as long as he’s been reading, driven by an abiding fascination with how these ancient texts helped to shape our world and, in turn, been reshaped and reimagined by writers throughout the ages. Today, Homer’s stories and heroes are known to millions of people who have never read them. This book will give a sense of the Iliad and the Odyssey—of their plot, their characters, their tone, and their poetry. It will provide a jumping-off point for those who want to know more about Homer, explaining where the poems came from and how they have reached us.