The Iliad of Homer / Translated into English Blank Verse by William Cowper

WITH NOTES, BY M.A. DWIGHT, AUTHOR OF “GRECIAN AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY.”
NEW-YORK: D. APPLETON & CO., 346 & 348 BROADWAY. M.DCCC.LX.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, By M.A. DWIGHT, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE EARL COWPER, THIS TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD, THE INSCRIPTION OF WHICH TO HIMSELF, THE LATE LAMENTED EARL, BENEVOLENT TO ALL, AND ESPECIALLY KIND TO THE AUTHOR, HAD NOT DISDAINED TO ACCEPT IS HUMBLY OFFERED, AS A SMALL BUT GRATEFUL TRIBUTE, TO THE MEMORY OF HIS FATHER, BY HIS LORDSHIP’S AFFECTIONATE KINSMAN AND SERVANT
WILLIAM COWPER.
June 4, 1791.
Whether a translation of Homer may be best executed in blank verse or in rhyme, is a question in the decision of which no man can find difficulty, who has ever duly considered what translation ought to be, or who is in any degree practically acquainted with those very different kinds of versification. I will venture to assert that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme, is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator’s ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention and expedient, the more likely he is to be betrayed into the widest departures from the guide whom he professes to follow. Hence it has happened, that although the public have long been in possession of an English Homer by a poet whose writings have done immortal honor to his country, the demand of a new one, and especially in blank verse, has been repeatedly and loudly made by some of the best judges and ablest writers of the present day.
I have no contest with my predecessor. None is supposable between performers on different instruments. Mr. Pope has surmounted all difficulties in his version of Homer that it was possible to surmount in rhyme. But he was fettered, and his fetters were his choice. Accustomed always to rhyme, he had formed to himself an ear which probably could not be much gratified by verse that wanted it, and determined to encounter even impossibilities, rather than abandon a mode of writing in which he had excelled every body, for the sake of another to which, unexercised in it as he was, he must have felt strong objections.