Alice Oswald Quotes

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.

There were poets before Homer.

Over the wine-dark sea.

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

I read The Odyssey all the time. I always get something out of it.

In all my books, I try to have a strong element of realism underlying the fantastic.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.