War Music

One of the most remarkable and idiosyncratic works of postwar British literature. To read War Music in its entirety is to appreciate just what an impact it has had on anglophone poets. Both Robert Fagles' superb translations of Homer and Alice Oswald's haunting and lapidary Memorial (2012) recognisably carry its stamp. All of them bear witness to the remarkable fact that still, after more than two and a half millennia, the Iliad continues to rank as the most heart-stopping, the most terrifying, the most tragic poem ever written. Tom Holland The Times