Homer’s Iliad

Description: 

Homer’s poem has many successors — excellent, eminently worthy, most of themprobably inspired by it – but nothing can take its place.

The Iliad is not only the fountainhead of poetry; it is probably its greatest summit. It is not only like a great mountain river rushing on with irresistible strength and unbearable beauty, staying in the mountains for a long time before making its spectacular descent through a world
almost too rugged to be lived in yet impossible not to dwell with once visited, its water
bearing all before it through the shining plain; it is also like the mountain itself and the
sea toward which its waters tend.

The poem is thus a world about a world. 

Is this world simply the world as such: elemental, profound, brutal, fecund, brilliant, terrible, filled with women and men, love and hate, gods, animals, plants, earth, sun, air, sky, sea?

What else is there, really? One thing, perhaps: words that have wings, pteroenta. A
reader keeping her ear to the poem’s ground may hear them alighting within the range
of her hearing.

There is nothing else like it under the sun — this sun to the sea of song
that has followed it. We will read The Iliad slowly: a book a week, an hour and a half at
a time, for 24 meetings — and then we will meet one final time to wonder at what we just
did.