SOURCE: "The Odyssey," in The Noble Voice: A Study of Ten Great Poems, Henry Holt and Company, 1946, pp. 45-85.

Van Doren was one of the most prolific men of letters in twentieth-century American writing. He wrote accomplished studies of Shakespeare, John Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, and served as the literary editor and film critic for the Nation during the 1920s and 1930s. Van Doren's criticism is aimed at the general reader, rather than the scholar or specialist, and is noted for its lively perception and wide interest. Like his fiction and poetry (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939), his criticism consistently examines the inner life of the individual. In this essay, Van Doren praises the Odyssey's "relaxed and spacious" spirit, deeming it "still the finest tale in print."

The first two sentences of the Odyssey are enough to inform us that now we...