The Iliad for Self-Learners

The Iliad is one of the most brilliant and moving, devastating and visceral representations of human life and experience. It's one of the earliest surviving works of world literature and it's one of the foundational poems of western culture. Uh the philosophers of the ancient world, Aristotle, Longginus, Socrates and Plato all knew their Homer and many of the English poets who are important to this channel were influenced by the Iliad. poets like Edmund Spencer, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Matthew Arnold, uh James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and many, many more.

In fact, every Renaissance moment has engaged in some way with Homer. Now, it's a poem concerned with the Greek war with Troy, but its meaning and significance for our own lives is still immediate, although not always apparent. In the Iliad, readers have found a work that mingles with the light of their own days, the light of the ancient. And during the American Renaissance in the 19th century, Henry David Thorro wrote this about the Iliad.

There are a few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the sereneest days and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its luster. But there it lies in the last of literature as it were the earliest latest production of the mine. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust.

Foulness preserved in cassia and pitch in swave and linen. The death of that which ever lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Menon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in its rising.

Throw writes what many have felt that the Iliad is a lesson in living fully and meaningfully in a short difficult life and about finding greatness in how we love grieve uh fight for others and treat others. Walt Whitman who was another poet of the Renaissance of America wrote that Homer grew out of and has held the ages and holds today by the universal admiration of personal prowess, courage, rankness, a more proper leadership inherent in the whole human race that so much of literature is held by Homer is such ...