Homer and the Romantics

Abstract

Responses to Homer during the 'Romantic' age (roughly, 1770-1830) were largely positive yet the emphases were often subtly different from those of the previous period and sometimes registered challenge or difficulty as well as easy acceptance. Many writers were prepared to acknowledge that Homer, or 'Homer', was endowed with a special authority which, like that of Shakespeare, gained in force from the absence of biographical detail. Homer was an originator, an original genius, the great poetic father (according, among others, to Godwin, Coleridge and Lamb). The worlds of the Iliad , the Odyssey (and, for some readers, the Hymns ) were vividly realised yet almost 'unimaginably different' from those which had developed in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Homer’s achievement was often unquestioned but it could be daunting and untouchable. This complex of reactions was given expression by Robert Southey in July 1797 when he wrote: 'With Homer and Milton no future, indeed no other, poems can be compared. The age of the one and the subject of the other preclude it, independant of their unequalled and perhaps unequalable merit.' Phrases such as 'old Homer' (used, for example, by Keats and Hazlitt) signalled that the Greek poet, who was still conveniently compressed into one individual by most readers, was endowed with the wisdom and insight achieved by experience: in artistic representations he is never youthful, unlike Apollo, the god with special jurisdiction over poetic affairs.