Homer
Quick answer: Homer craft guide: epithets, similes and in medias res openings from the Iliad and Odyssey, with practical lessons for poets writing narrative today.
Nobody knows for certain who Homer was, and it barely matters for the craft. The two epics attributed to him, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were composed in Greek around the eighth century BCE out of a much older oral tradition, in the six-beat line called dactylic hexameter. Singers performed them from memory for audiences who already knew the plot, which forced the poems to win on texture, tension and delivery rather than surprise.
That constraint is why Homer still teaches working poets. Every technique in the epics exists to keep a listening audience gripped: the repeated epithets that stabilise the verse, the similes that open windows onto ordinary life, the decision to start the story in the middle of the trouble. Three thousand years of narrative poetry has been elaborating on his toolkit.
The poem
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
Homer, translated by Alexander Pope, 'The Iliad' (1715)
The signature moves
Four Homeric habits are directly observable in any decent translation.
What you can learn from Homer
Start your next narrative poem at the latest possible moment, inside the argument, after the storm has already hit, and trust the reader to catch up. Then practise the epic simile: when your poem reaches its most violent or painful image, cut away to something domestic and let the comparison run for four or five lines before returning. The delay builds pressure rather than releasing it.
Epithets translate too. Give a recurring person or object in your poem a fixed descriptive tag, use it twice straight, then bend it the third time. Readers feel the change like a chord shift.
Where to start reading
Iliad Book 1 for the quarrel, Book 6 for Hector and Andromache, Books 22 and 24 for the duel and the ransom, which contain some of the most affecting scenes in Western literature. In the Odyssey, Books 9 to 12, the hero's own telling of his wanderings. Emily Wilson's and Robert Fagles's translations are clear modern doors in; Alexander Pope's eighteenth century version is a monument in its own right.
What poets can take from this
- Open a narrative poem in the middle of the trouble and feed backstory only when the reader needs it.
- At the moment of greatest violence or grief, cut to an extended domestic simile.
- Give a recurring character a fixed epithet, then break it once for effect.
- Use a list, of names, places or objects, as a deliberate movement in a poem, not filler.
- Read your narrative aloud; oral poetry survives because every line earns its listening.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that begins in the final hour of a long conflict, a family feud, a house move, a war, without explaining how it started. Include one simile at least four lines long that compares the conflict to something from kitchen or field work.
Questions
Did Homer really exist?
Scholars still debate it. The epics grew from a long oral tradition, and 'Homer' may name one shaping genius, several poets, or the tradition itself. The craft lessons hold either way.
Which translation of Homer should a poet read?
Emily Wilson and Robert Fagles offer clear, muscular modern English. Pope's rhyming version and Chapman's Elizabethan one are worth sampling to hear how differently the same material can sing.
What metre did Homer use?
Dactylic hexameter, a six-beat line suited to Greek. English translators usually substitute blank verse, loose five-beat lines, or free verse, since strict hexameter fights the English language.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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