L COWPER,

THIS
TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD,

THE INSCRIPTION OF WHICH TO HIMSELF,
THE LATE LAMENTED EARL,
BENEVOLENT TO ALL,
AND ESPECIALLY KIND TO THE AUTHOR,
HAD NOT DISDAINED TO ACCEPT
IS HUMBLY OFFERED,
AS A SMALL BUT GRATEFUL TRIBUTE,

TO THE MEMORY OF HIS FATHER,
BY HIS LORDSHIP'S
AFFECTIONATE KINSMAN AND SERVANT

WILLIAM COWPER.
_June 4, 1791._

PREFACE.

Whether a translation of HOMER may be best executed in blank verse or
in rhyme, is a question in the decision of which no man can find
difficulty, who has ever duly considered what translation ought to be,
or who is in any degree practically acquainted with those very
different kinds of versification. I will venture to assert that a just
translation of any ancient poet in rhyme, is impossible. No human
ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with
sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and
only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity,
indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at
invention and expedient, the more likely he is to be betrayed into the
widest departures from the guide whom he professes to follow. Hence it
has happened, that although the public have long been in possession of
an English HOMER by a poet whose writings have done immortal honor to
his country, the demand of a new one, and especially in blank verse,
has been repeatedly and loudly made by some of the best judges and
ablest writers of the present day.

I have no contest with my predecessor. None is supposable between
performers on different instruments. Mr. Pope has surmounted all
difficulties in his version of HOMER that it was possible to surmount
in rhyme. But he was fettered, and his fetters were his choice.
Accustomed always to rhyme, he had formed to himself an ear which
probably could not be much gratified by verse that wanted it, and
determined to encounter even impossibilities, rather than abandon a
mode of writing in which he had excelled every body, for the sake of
another to which, unexercised in it as he was, he must have felt
strong objec