SOURCE: "Telemachus and the Telemacheia," in The Art of the Odyssey, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967, pp. 30-44.

In the following essay, first published in the American Journal of Philology in 1963, Clarke discusses the first four books of the Odyssey, known collectively as the Telemacheia, which deal with Telemachus' journey and his gradual coming of age.

The criticism of Homeric epic has become so formalized over the centuries that it has developed denominations to accommodate scholars of various persuasions. There are, first, the "Separatists," who believe that the Iliad and the Odyssey are by two different poets, who may not have even known of each other's work. Then there are the "Analysts," who believe that different poets worked on different parts of the two poems at different stages in their evolution, with "Homer" being credited with whatever was most meritorious in this process. Opposed to the analytical critics are the "Unitarians...