Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
The Odyssey of Homer - cover

We are sorry! The publisher (or author) gave us the instruction to take down this book from our catalog. But please don't worry, you still have more than 500,000 other books you can enjoy!

The Odyssey of Homer

Alexander Pope

Publisher: Lighthouse Books for Translation and Publishing

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

The Odyssey of Homer by Alexander Pope. 
Alexander Pope, (born May 21, 1688, London, England—died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London), poet and satirist of the English Augustan period, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors.
Pope’s father, a wholesale linen merchant, retired from business in the year of his son’s birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The Popes were Roman Catholics, and at Binfield they came to know several neighbouring Catholic families who were to play an important part in the poet’s life. Pope’s religion procured him some lifelong friends, notably the wealthy squire John Caryll (who persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock, on an incident involving Caryll’s relatives) and Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of the most memorable of his poems and to whom he bequeathed most of his property. But his religion also precluded him from a formal course of education, since Catholics were not admitted to the universities. He was trained at home by Catholic priests for a short time and attended Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester, and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the “Ode on Solitude” and a paraphrase of St. Thomas à Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written at age 12.
Windsor Forest was near enough to London to permit Pope’s frequent visits there. He early grew acquainted with former members of John Dryden’s circle, notably William Wycherley, William Walsh, and Henry Cromwell. By 1705 his “Pastorals” were in draft and were circulating among the best literary judges of the day. In 1706 Jacob Tonson, the leading publisher of poetry, had solicited their publication, and they took the place of honour in his Poetical Miscellanies in 1709.
This early emergence of a man of letters may have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a result of too much study, so he thought, he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease, that limited his growth and seriously impaired his health. His full-grown height was 4 feet 6 inches (1.4 metres), but the grace of his profile and fullness of his eye gave him an attractive appearance. He was a lifelong sufferer from headaches, and his deformity made him abnormally sensitive to physical and mental pain. Though he was able to ride a horse and delighted in travel, he was inevitably precluded from much normal physical activity, and his energetic, fastidious mind was largely directed to reading and writing. 
 
Available since: 06/05/2019.

Other books that might interest you

  • Wild Notes (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

    Wild Notes (NHB Modern Plays)

    Deirdre Kinahan

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A play exploring the impact of colonialism through a meeting between Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist who visited Ireland in the 1840s, and a young Irishwoman hoping to emigrate to the country he's running from.
    Deirdre Kinahan's short play Wild Notes was first staged by Solas Nua in Washington D.C. in 2018.
    The play is also available in the collection Deirdre Kinahan: Shorts.
    Show book
  • Flourish - cover

    Flourish

    Jacqueline Turner

    • 0
    • 1
    • 0
    “Smart, clear-eyed… Turner’s gift is for beautiful concision.” — Georgia Straight on The Ends of the Earth
    		 
    Jacqueline Turner’s Flourish moves between philosophy, literary criticism, biography, and poetry. Both personal and experimental, her writing becomes transformative as it explores memories of growing up in a small town, parenting a set of adventurous sons, traveling, and reading. At times her poems act like micro essays, at other times they are miniature memoirs or precise manifestos, and throughout the collection’s exploration of contemporary cities and culture, a tense beauty emerges. 
    		 
    Turner takes readers to a park in Berlin set up like a messy living room, to a gallery in Granada where the view from a window beside a famous painting more perfectly frames an ancient stone wall, and to a karaoke room in Tokyo where comedic possibilities merge with spilled drinks. In the end, Flourish celebrates the abundance of words already read, while conveying gratitude for the ones still about to be read. A bold gesture, a green light, a way forward in challenging times.
    Show book
  • Don't Let Me Be Lonely - An American Lyric - cover

    Don't Let Me Be Lonely - An...

    Claudia Rankine

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity—of thought, imagination, and sentence-making—while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.
    Show book
  • Satan's Diary - cover

    Satan's Diary

    Steven Darrell Bates

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    I’m the only one to have walked the cobblestones of the Most High. I’m the only one to have seduced a woman and made her walk away from everything she loved and cherished. I’m the only one who can convince a person steadfast in their faith, to throw it all away for riches beyond their wildest dreams. 
    My lust for power is unquenchable, and I will use every trick at my disposal to gain an advantage. Even if it means destroying a church leader and his family with delectable treats full of envy, pride, greed, and lust. 
    Show book
  • The Saviour (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

    The Saviour (NHB Modern Plays)

    Deirdre Kinahan

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    There's a new man in Máire's life. But some people aren't happy.
    It's the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday, and Máire is sitting up in bed, enjoying a cigarette. There's a man downstairs. She is blooming.
    Charting the extraordinary shift in social, political and religious life in Ireland over the past thirty years, The Saviour asks questions about responsibility, about how we respond to trauma, and about the tricky question of forgiveness.
    Deirdre Kinahan's blistering play for two actors was first presented online as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2021 by Landmark Productions, using the auditorium of The Everyman, Cork, as a backdrop.
    Show book
  • My Madonna - cover

    My Madonna

    Robert W. Service

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    LibriVox volunteers bring you 21 different recordings of My Madonna by Robert W. Service. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of August 12th, 2007.
    Show book