Excerpt from The Iliad of Homer, Vol. 1

There is another point in regard to which I have taken equal pains, and which seems to me equally im portant. I have endeavored to preserve the simplicity of style which distinguishes the old Greek poet, whowrote for the popular ear and according to the genius of his language, and I have chosen such English as offers no violence to the ordinary usages and structure of our own. I have sought to attain what belongs to the original, a fluent narrative style, which shall carry the reader forward without the impediment of unex pected inversions and capricious phrases, and in which, if he find nothing to stop at and admire, there will at least be nothing to divert his attention from the story and the characters of the poem, from the events related and the objects described. I think that not many readers of the present day would agree with Pope, who, as Spence relates, after remarking that he had nothing to say for rhyme, went on to observe that be doubted whether a poem could be supported without it in our language, unless it were stiffened with such strange words as would destroy our language itself. It is te markable that this should have been said by one who had given the reading world an edition of Shakespeare, in whose dramas are to be found passages of blank verse which might be instanced as the perfection of that form of versification, not to be excelled in sweetness of modulation, and grace and freedom of language, without a single harsh inversion, or any of that clumsy stiffening which Pope so disapproved, yet seemed to think so necessary. The other dramatists of the Eliza bethan period also supply examples of the same noble simplicity of language and construction, suited to the highest poetry. In this translation the natural order of the words has been carefully preserved, as far as the exigencies of versification would allow, and I have ven tured only upon those easy deviations from it which form no interruptions to the sense, and at most only te mind the reader that he is reading verse.

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