Chapman writes in verse throughout, using long rhyming couplets with a loose iambic heptameter that creates a rolling, slightly breathless momentum. His diction is archaic and densely Elizabethan: in Book 21 he writes "What tears are these? What sad looks spoil thy face?" and "rarely magnified," phrases that require a reader willing to slow down and decode period English. Graves, despite being tagged as prose in most of the book, shifts into short rhyming stanzas for the opening invocation and for the two-fate speech in Book 9, giving "Twin fates dispute your death, heroic son" a clipped, ballad-like quality. His prose passages, such as the Book 21 speech, run in a plain contemporary register: "Did you ever see so strong or so handsome a man?" reads almost conversational. The two translations pull in opposite formal directions, and a reader's tolerance for archaic verse will largely decide which feels accessible. Chapman moves freely from the Greek, expanding images and inserting interpretive commentary. In Book 5, Athena's rebuke to Diomedes gains an editorial gloss Chapman adds himself: "He is inconstant, impious, mad." The Greek has "raving" and "renegade" qualities but not that stacked moral verdict. Graves follows the Greek's movement closely in prose passages and mostly preserves the speech order of the original, though his verse insertions, particularly the Book 6 leaves passage, expand Homer's spare lines into a four-stanza lyric that adds imagery the Greek does not contain, including "cold earth they rot." Chapman gains rhetorical heat; Graves gains clarity and structural tidiness. Both lose something of the Greek's compression, especially in Book 6, where Homer says the same thing in six lines that both translators spread considerably wider.
Achilles' baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that impos'd
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls loos'd
From breasts heroic; sent them far to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave:
To all which Jove's will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis' godlike son.
Sing, Mountain Goddess, sing through me
That anger which most ruinously
Inflamed Achilles, Peleus' son,
And which, before the tale was done,
Had glutted Hell with champions—bold,
Stern spirits by the thousandfold;
Ravens and dogs their corpses ate
For thus did Zeus, who watched their fate,
See his resolve, first taken when
Proud Agamemnon, King of men,
An insult on Achilles cast,
Achieve accomplishment at last.