Set in the final days of the Trojan War, Homer's poem recounts a formative moment in not only Greek culture, but in that of the West as a whole. W.C. Bryant's verse translation has been acclaimed for over a century, rendering Homer's hexameter into the epic metre of our own "manly and flexible tongue". In Bryant's sublime blank verse, Homer's winged words take flight, never surpassed but in the Greek for grace and power.