Brendan’s Reviews > A Preface to Paradise Lost > Status Update
Brendan
is on page 28 of 192
“The unchanging recurrence of [Homer’s] ‘wine-dark sea’, his ‘rosy-fingered dawn,’ his ships launched ‘into the holy brine,’ his ‘Poseidon shaker of earth,’ produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere
— Mar 23, 2026 08:30PM
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Brendan’s Previous Updates
Brendan
is on page 81 of 192
“To enjoy our full humanity we ought, so far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times, and on occasion to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an 18th century Londoner while reading Johnson.”
— Mar 29, 2026 05:17PM
Brendan
is on page 4 of 192
“The matter inside the poet *wants* the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original… The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man’s mind; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him”
— Mar 15, 2026 04:45PM
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Mar 23, 2026 08:33PM
elsewhere ill represented in literature. What is really on our minds when we first catch sight of the sea after a long absence, or look up, as watchers in a sickroom or as sentries, to see yet another daybreak? Many things, no doubt — all manner of hopes and fears, pain or pleasure, and the beauty of grimness of that particular sea and that particular dawn. Yes; but under all these, like a base so deep as to be scarcely audible, there is something which we might very lamely express by muttering ‘same old sea’ or ‘same old morning.’ Their permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the differences between life and imagined life.”
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(Incidentally, this helps me articulate why I don’t like translations of Homer that remove the stock phrases and poetic epithets!)
