Pope and Homer

210 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY others is unfortunate. Philosophers will be astonished to find that his relation to Leibniz is dismissed in a single paragraph whereas it takes over three pages to discuss his relation to William James. It seems to me the agreements and disagreements with Leibniz are a much more fruitful historical approach to Whitehead. The philosophy of Whitehead is essentially a monadic philosophy which escapes, among other things, the substance-attribute doctrine which plagued Leibniz. The reasons for this go far to illuminate what Whitehead was trying to say. The next chapter gives a sound, but sketchy, statement of Whitehead 's relation to science, the apparent paradox that an idealist in metaphysics was a realist in epistemology, the meaning of organic mechanism, and the impact of evolutionary theories on the formation of his system. The book ends with an evaluation which consists largely of a concise statement of the criticisms of Whitehead which Professor Johnson feels merit careful consideration. This is not the place to quarrel with Professor Johnson on his treatment of some phases of this very difficult subject. It is more fitting to congratulate him on the general merit of his work. This introduction to the philosophy of Whitehead will prove invaluable to those seeking some understanding of a system of thought which may very well be, as Professor Johnson believes, the most important philosophic contribution of our century. POPE AND HOMER" F. E. L. PRIESTLEY The process of rehabilitation so justly undertaken on Pope's behalf by modern critics is given noble support by Mr. Knight's wholly excellent book. Not long ago Mr. Maurice Baring, himself a translator of great versatility and skill, bluntly asserted that, next to the original Homer, Pope's Homer was best, but the dominant taste in our time has preferred prose versions of ever increasing informality. One highly popular version of the Odyssey blandly offers Odysseus' nurse to us speaking the North Country dialect of the music hall; this, we are assured, is more faithful to the original epic poetry than poetic translation . The assumptions about the nature of epic poetry, and particularly about Homeric epic, and about the nature of translation which allow an undistinguished and uneven prose to be put forward as adequate representation of great poetry obviously need re-exami- *Pope and the Heroic Tradition: A Critical Study of His Iliad. By DOUGLAS KNIGHT. Yale Studies in English, BENJAMIN CH1USTIE NANGLE, Editor, 117. Published on the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press [Toronto: The Ryerson Press1. 1951. Pp. x, 124. $4.25. REVIEWS 211 nation. It seems especially anomalous in an age which reads little poetry and less Greek to suggest that prose can convey the effect of Greek poetry; a prose translation may mean something to a reader who has some halting acquaintance with the effect of the original, or some familiarity with the tone and manner of epic poetry in other tongues, but the prose alone can surely not in itself create a sense of epic style. Modem prose versions of Homer usually place emphasis upon literal accuracy, and one longs at times for a counter-Bentley who will cry, "Very painstaking, but you must not call it Homer." Mr. Knight starts with a full awareness of these matters. He disposes of a few myths at the outset: that Pope knew little Greek and that he was unaware of the problems of translation. Some evidence and argument for the adequacy of Pope's knowledge of the Homeric language and text are given in an appendix; fuller discussion is to come in an edition of Pope's Homer, but what is given is convincing. Pope's critical approach to the task of translation, as given in his many notes as well as in the Preface, takes up the first third of Mr. Knight's book. Here we are given a thorough and most illuminating exposition of Pope's aims, his attempt to interpret the Iliad "in terms of its total significance," as "one coherent structure," to prevent "a misreading of the Iliad which will put...