Silence Is Better

From A Lexicon Of The Homeric Dialect

My main hope has been, by making the reading of Homer easier, to bring him to readers who will read the epics as what above all things they are–as poems, as works of imagination. For such reading, translations being useless, an accurate and familiar knowledge of the Homeric language is the first essential. This knowledge is not to be acquired without hard, and possibly repulsive, work with grammar and dictionary; but though the way be long, the reward is sure. Let a man once acquire the power to read Homer as he reads Spenser or Milton, and he will have a possession which he would change for no other, an unfailing source of solace and of the purest pleasure. Homer is like Shakespeare in this, that he cannot be exhausted, that the more he is read the more there is found, and that while the effects are more and more felt, the means by which they are got remain more and more mysterious. The epics must be read as wholes, and not as is too much the way, in books here and there. It will come to be realized more and more with each reading that under the smooth and apparently art-less surface there lie depths of supreme and conscious art. The man who has realized this has gone far to solve for himself the Homeric problem.