Hissed broiling, and the roots popped.
In a smithy one sees a white-hot axehead or an adze
Plunged and wrung in a cold tub, screeching steam—
The way they make soft iron hale and hard—:
Just so that eyeball hissed around the spike.
The Kyklops bellowed and the rock roared round him,
And we fell back in fear. Clawing his face
He tugged the bloody spike out of his eye,
Threw it away, and his wild hands went groping;
Then he set up a howl for Kyklopes
Who lived in caves on windy peaks nearby…
    I have to say this. Let them scream and point to it as proof of the prodigious magnitude of my ignorance but I don’t care. I wonder if I’m the first person brave and foolish enough to say it—certainly no one else I know of has ever breathed the idea. But I must be honest, and honestly leads me into the appalling trap of embarrassment and humiliation before my peers and their superiors and even their inferiors. Damn it, I have to say it. The Odyssey is definitely inferior to The Iliad. I cannot serious believe that they were written by the same man (which they weren’t, of course), but I can’t believe the same blind poet, having spoken The Iliad, could have uttered The Odyssey and still have kept his lunch down.
    I know it’s a great idea but really its the same idea that occurs in every culture—the great voyage to strange place where thar be dragons. No other culture has so profound and detailed an account of warfare, and what’s wrong with it, as The Iliad. Yes, The Odyssey possesses many memorable images of which the one quoted above is the most detailed and outstanding, vividly described if you allow for a certain braggart’s tone as the hero tells his tales. The great bits are great indeed, but the work as a whole is a pain. Admittedly, there is Penelope and the endless tapestry, the search of Telemachus, and the slaughter of the suitors at the end and all of it is good, but the really terrific stuff is all in two of its 24 books (IX and X) —Circe and Cyclopes and the Sirens—and it’s all over in a few breathless pages. The rest is a lot of boring shit about Gods and kings, all of no account. It’s a shambles, up and down everywhere, and way below the skills of the man who recited The Iliad.
     May my bones find eternal torment in Hades...