How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fagles

...It teaches well. 'Nuff said. I still prefer the Fitzgerald Aeneid (for its brilliant and beautiful attempts to define a high style in American English, which I think is more like what Virgil was doing), but the more and more I work with it, I get over the shock of the rawness of Fagles' Homer and appreciate the poetry in that very quality: brutal, quick (if you read it aloud, not silently), yet capacious, it seems to really connect with the students. One still can't get over how frightening this is sometimes: you start to see that the Greek world of the poem might feel a little too close to how things are now, with intense, almost savage forms of honorific struggle among so many uncertainties, which seem to swoop down like so many gods from above... But there's something disturbing--and something that should be disturbing--in all such identifications. I can't recommend it enough.