Listening to Pope
Pope translated the Homeric poems into "heroic couplets," which are a type of meter conventionally used for epic and narrative poetry. Essentially, the heroic couplet consists of a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. In turn, a pentameter is a succession of five iambic feet, each of which contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. In the following video we will listen to verses 578-643 of the last book of the Iliad in Pope's translation. The verses are dramatically read by Sarah Wingo, graduate student at the School of Information (University of Michigan) and Ralph Williams, Professor Emeritus of English (University of Michigan).
The Odyssey