Anonymous
6/16/2025, 1:25:32 PM No.24470897
>Samuel Taylor Coleridge said Chapman's Homer provides readers with a "small idea of Homer", saying it was as if "he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth".
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Thread 24470897 - /lit/ [Archived: 932 hours ago]
Anonymous
6/16/2025, 1:42:16 PM No.24470924
>>24470897 (OP)
Yet another proof that the Anglos are unfit for literary criticism.
Yet another proof that the Anglos are unfit for literary criticism.
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Anonymous
6/16/2025, 2:32:33 PM No.24470991
>>24470924
Are you insulting Chapman or Coleridge? Because Coleridge was warmly appreciative of Chapman and the Op quote is really meant to be more of a complement.
>[Chapman's Homer] has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queene—it will give you a small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet—as Homer might have written had he lived in England under the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Are you insulting Chapman or Coleridge? Because Coleridge was warmly appreciative of Chapman and the Op quote is really meant to be more of a complement.
>[Chapman's Homer] has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queene—it will give you a small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet—as Homer might have written had he lived in England under the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Anonymous
6/17/2025, 2:11:15 AM No.24472435
>>24470897 (OP)
This is literally why he's a great translator. He makes you believe Homer was an Englishman.
This is literally why he's a great translator. He makes you believe Homer was an Englishman.
Anonymous
6/17/2025, 10:26:12 AM No.24473282
>>24470897 (OP)
The temperament of Chapman had more in it of an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet's; and had Homer been no more than the mightiest of skalds or the Iliad than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would have been fitter to play the part of their herald or interpreter. His fiery and turbid style has in it the action rather of earthquakes and volcanoes than of the oceanic verse it labours to represent; it can give us but the pace of a giant for echo of the footfall of a god; it can shew but the huge movements of the heaving earth, inflated and inflamed with unequal and violent life, for the innumerable unity and harmony, the radiant and buoyant music of luminous motion, the simplicity and equality of passion and of power, the majestic monochord of single sound underlying as it were at the heart of Homeric verse the multitudinous measures of the epic sea.
The temperament of Chapman had more in it of an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet's; and had Homer been no more than the mightiest of skalds or the Iliad than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would have been fitter to play the part of their herald or interpreter. His fiery and turbid style has in it the action rather of earthquakes and volcanoes than of the oceanic verse it labours to represent; it can give us but the pace of a giant for echo of the footfall of a god; it can shew but the huge movements of the heaving earth, inflated and inflamed with unequal and violent life, for the innumerable unity and harmony, the radiant and buoyant music of luminous motion, the simplicity and equality of passion and of power, the majestic monochord of single sound underlying as it were at the heart of Homeric verse the multitudinous measures of the epic sea.