Homeric Technique

HOMERIC TECHNIQ.UE· E. T. OWEN T HERE have appeared in recent years a humber of books on Homer which encourage the hope that the spirit of Homeric criticism is undergoing a change.1 It is not that the controversy is settled, or that the Unitarians have won, but the realization seems to be creeping in that after all the Homeric Question his very little to do with the poems. Mr. Bowra puts the case thus: HBoth sides have begun to agree on the opinion that, whatever the authorship of the Iliad may be, it is still in some sense a work of art and has undergone some formative influence from a single poet. This poet may have composed the whole poem or he may have transformed independent poems into a unity, but in either case the poem may, and indeed must, be considered as a single work of art." And Professor Woodhouse more pointedly: "Nothing can alter the fact that the Odyssey stands in the world just as it is, and not otherwise. The function of criticism, here at any rate, is not to teach the poet a better way, but to endeavour to realize at full value just what he has chosen to give, in the way in which he chose to give it." Surely this is a reasonable position to take. The poems do undoubtedly exist, and each of them as it stands is clearly intended to be regarded as an artistic whole. 'The flaws that have been found are either there e1 or not there, and, if they are there, they either matter LTradition and Design.in the Iliad. C. M. Bowra. Oxford, 1930. The Composition of Homer's Odyssey. W. J. Woodhouse. Oxford, 1930. Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II, C. XVIII. . J. B. Bury. Macmillan, 1924. The Pattern of the Iliad. J. T. Sheppard. Methuen, 1922. The Epic and The Idea of Great Poetry. Lascelles Abercrombie. Seeker, 1922 and 1925. 86 HOMERIC TECHNIQUE or de;> not matter for the poem, and the cause of their being there does not alter their effect in the poem. It is· legitimate, therefore, to put aside the question of authorship and sources, arid to consider the existing· poems, in their entirety, as works of art. It is true, of course, that the art of a poem can be accurately estimated only in reference to the public fot which it was composed and the methods of publication which directed a.nd controlled the poet in composing it, and therefore, as we have no certain knowledge of these things in the ·case of Homer, we cannot rightly appraisecannot even fully hear-the art of the constructor of the Iliad -and Odyssey. But the poems· themselves do show enough for us to form reasonable conjectures in regard to some of the external conditions with which the poet was faced. We can see, for example, tha:t he has in mind listeners, not readers, and many of the characteristic features of his narrative method are clearly devices designed to meet the obvious difficulties of a poet reciting a very long poem. The question of the conditions which called for or allowed the recitation of such long poems must not be pressed~ It may seem a vital one, but the difficulty of determining with historical certitude what these conditions were should not make us postpone for ever accepting . and examining the poems as poems. They were composed for listeners and they are long. These two fact~ (for, -though the first may be, strictly speaking, a con-: j ecture, there is no reasonable doubt of it) are the basic facts we must take into account in judging the artistic methods of the poet. And they doJ taken together, largely account for much of what we have come to call the Homeric or Epic manner. For us Homer created the Epic, but for Homer, so to. 87 'THE UNIVERSITY-OF TORONTO QUARTERLY put it, the Epic was but the natural, inevitable form for a long story. · In other words, the' Epic in its natural state and to its natural ·public is not, in intention, an Epic at all in our specific sense; it is simply the...