The Iliad without anger

In 2011 the British poet and professor of literature Alice Oswald published the long poem Memorial, which she calls “an excavation of Homer’s Iliad.” Here she has removed the actual narrative drive from the poem, the rage of Achilles, to give every single one of the 200 dead warriors poetic life. Oswald wants to dig out the poem’s enargeia, its effective power. The result is a long poem that turns away from the bloody anger towards a commemoration of the dead.

Oswald meets the literature professor and author Janne Stigen Drangsholt for a conversation about Memorial.