“Poetry cannot make a machine, but it is the food of the imagination: it expresses the highest part of man, his eternal hopes and fears, his most intimate feelings, his speculations on the universe, and on his own great end. There is one epic poet, Homer, the Greek. Other Greeks imitated Homer, but they never came near him; Vergil wrote what he called an epic, and so did Milton, but they are not epics. The epic poet depicts a real world in action: there it is, as clear as if we saw it with our eyes; clearer indeed, for the art of the poet lies in that he can, by selection, bring his world within focus for our eyes, which we could not do for ourselves. What a supreme achievement Homer’s was, we can see, if we compare Thomas Hardy’s effort to bring Napoleon’s world before our eyes. He has failed: Homer succeeded, no one else has ever succeeded; and Homer stands, therefore, unrivalled at the head of the world’s poets.”
W.H.D. Rouse, Machines or Mind?