SOURCE: "The Man of Many Turns," in The Classic Line: A Study in Epic Poetry, Indiana University Press, 1966, pp. 120-37.

In the following essay, Cook assesses the themes, settings, and tone of the Odyssey, maintaining that the poem is lighter in tone but equally as profound as the Iliad

The epic poem is all-embracing; it is comprehensive, rather than encyclopedic, in character. It is their focus, more even than their lack of verse form, which deprives Finnegans Wake or La Comédie Humaine of an epic aura, and which almost gives one to War and Peace. The distinction, while elusive, is nicely illustrated by the contrast between the encyclopedic Tesoro of Dante's master Brunetto Latini and the comprehensiveness of the Divina Commedia itself.

The code that is to press the mortality of the hero, the verse style that is to sound the depths of his objectified feeling, though...