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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
It is the special function of the poet to create beauty. Loveliness may appear in many thousand forms, but among these one of the most satisfying is the ‘pen-picture’, the Homeric or Virgilian simile, complete and perfect in three or four lines. Pope speaks of
‘The Simile that solitary shines
In the dry desert of a thousand lines.’
page 21 note 1 I am using for Homer the prose translation of Lang, Leaf, and Myers; and for Virgil the metrical version of Rhoades.