Swift led a campaign for subscriptions to it and Dr. Johnson loved it, Pope’s translation of The Iliad of Homer, calling it “a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal” and “the greatest version of poetry which the world has ever seen.” Richard Bentley famously sneered; Blake hated it. In our day, Harold Bloom has called Johnson’s verdict “scandalous overpraise of a version now dead for nearly all of us” and engages in his familiar neo-Freudian voodoo about Johnson’s being “too good a son to his poetic father Pope” by refusing to slay him. Today, Bloom’s report of the death of Pope’s Iliad looks as exaggerated as his supporting jargon looks absurd. For Penguin Classics has splendidly decided to commemorate their fiftieth anniversary by publishing a remarkable edition of Pope’s Iliad.
The editor, Steven Shankman, is the author of Pope’s Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion (1983). He has given us a sensibly chosen text: that of 1743, the last to have been revised by Pope himself. In an appendix, Professor Shankman collates all earlier editions (for, it seems, the first time). Save for decapitalizing nouns that are not proper nouns, the editor does not modernize Pope’s meticulous punctuation or use of italics for proper nouns. “This Penguin paperback,” says Professor Shankman, “is a direct descendant of the pocket editions ultimately favored by Pope”—that is, by 1741, when Pope hoped his book would be bought by “the Many.”
This edition presents, for
