Odyssey Critical Essay | Critical Essay by René Le Bossu

Critical Essay by René Le Bossu

SOURCE: "Selections from Treatise of the Epick Poem (1675) translated by W. J.," in The Continental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, in English Translation, edited by Scott Elledge and Donald Schier; revised edition, Cornell, 1970, pp. 307-23.

Le Bossu was a French critic best known for his Treatise on Epic Poetry, written in 1675. Much discussed in England even before it was translated into English, the Treatise was severely criticized by Samuel Johnson and, in France, by Voltaire for its rigid rules concerning epic poetry. In the following excerpt from that work, Le Bossu analyzes Homer's crafting of the hero of the Odyssey, Ulysses.

The Odyssey was not designed, like the Iliad, for the instruction of all the states of Greece joined in one body, but for each state in particular. As a state is composed of two parts, the head which commands and the members...
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