"In Chapman's Whole Works of Homer ... English is spendthrift, inebriate with waste motion, at times precious and as yet uncertain of its coruscating force. It is also the language of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, charged with sensory, corporeal thrust. At moments, it is already exact in that manual, pragmatic vein which is the virtue of English. At others, it ... Read morecomes armed with lyric sorrow. Homer, as Chapman construes him ... makes the English language know itself and impels it to cast its lexical-grammatical net over a thronging prodigality of life."
George Steiner, Homer in English "Each age approaches Homer, and particularly the Odyssey, with a kind of astonishment ... Chapman was Shakespeare's contemporary... At times, noticing the epic sustainability of his verse, you get the feeling that he occupies a point on an imaginary line between Shakespeare and Milton..."
Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian Show Less