HOMER WHOLE: A Reading of the Iliad (2009; 2017)

NOTE: Homer Whole is a corrected, revised, and renamed edition of Homer for Real, published in 2009 by The Oliver Arts & Open Press.

The Iliad is one of the most misinterpreted—and thereby maligned—books ever composed, recited, or written. Eric Larsen’s Homer Whole sets out to correct this misreading of the great epic, to move it out of the caves of primitivism current readers consign it to and raise it to its proper place as the central foundational work of modern literary art.

The Iliad has in it much blood, gore, suffering, and death; but it also, in Blake’s great phrase, holds much “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love.” To emphasize one side of the poem over the other; to assume one to be “good” and the other “bad”; one “barbaric” and the other “civilized”—this is to read the Iliad with one eye closed and the poem reduced to one-dimensionality, its aesthetic, emotional, and philosophical textures and depths—the essence of its modernity—unseen and unknown. It is far different from reading Homer whole.

—The Oliver Arts & Open Press

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“What a pleasure! Homer Whole flows beautifully and brings the Iliad alive in a way I’ve never experienced it. I can imagine actually being present at the confrontation between Achilles and Agamemnon, or between Paris and Hector, or sitting with the elders on the wall of Troy. And the pace is perfect–relaxed, contemplative. I love the references to great works of literature as stepping stones for observing changes in human experience over time. A joy to read.”
—A reader

“Homer Whole fills a reader with a sense of the magical continuity of literature and its immense richness—including its references to Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf as ways of elucidating Homer. In offering the remarkable idea that Homer is working in the region of deep human psychology—as in the passage, presaging Shakespeare, where Helen’s ideas dramatically evolve and change as she speaks—Homer Whole makes for inspiring literary analysis.”
 —A reader