When the immense drugged universe explodes In a cascade of unendurable colour And leaves us gasping naked, This is no more than the ectasy of chaos: … - Robert Graves

Hate and Fear are not wanted here, Nor Toys nor Country Lovers, Everything they took from my new poem book But the flyleaf and the covers.

If modern scholars overlook the entertainment motive, dominant in the Iliad, and treat Homer as a Virgil, Dante, or Milton, rather than as a Shakespeare or Cervantes, they are doing him a great disservice. The Iliad, Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s later plays are life — tragedy salted with humour; the Aeneid, the Inferno and Paradise Lost are literary works of almost superhuman eloquence, written for fame not profit, and seldom read except as a solemn intellectual task. The Iliad, and its later companion-piece, the Odyssey, deserve to be rescued from the classroom curse which has lain heavily on them throughout the past twenty-six centuries, and become entertainment once more; which is what I have attempted here. How this curse fell on them can be simply explained.

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.