SOURCE: "Homer: The Odyssey," in The English Epic and Its Background, Oxford University Press, 1954, pp. 21-39.

Tillyard was an English scholar of Renaissance literature who remains highly reputed for his studies of John Milton, William Shakespeare, and the epic form. In the essay below, Tillyard details similarities between the Iliad and the Odyssey, maintaining that they are different but equally brilliant poems.

Some readers think the Odyssey greatly inferior to the Iliad. T. E. Lawrence's chilly preface to his translation is a modern example of such an opinion, and Longinus's remark on the Odyssey, with its fabulous element, being the work of an old man is an ancient one. To both Pope gives the best answer in his postscript to his translation:

Whoever reads the Odyssey with an eye to the Iliad, expecting to find it of the same character, or of the same sort of spirit, will...