Pope published his Iliad between 1715 and 1720, working in heroic couplets, and the form shapes everything about the reading experience. Each pair of rhymed iambic pentameter lines creates a closed, balanced unit, and Pope fills those units with elevated Augustan diction. In Book 1, he gives readers "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumbered," where "direful spring" is entirely his own invention, added to produce the rhyme and the period register. Jordan writes in unrhymed verse with lines of varying length and uses plain contemporary English: "ruinous, that caused the Greeks untold ordeals." Pope's rhythm is formal and insistent. Jordan's lines move more unevenly, closer to ordinary speech. In the Book 21 passage, Pope writes "what boots it to deplore," a phrase no modern reader uses naturally, while Jordan writes "but why complain," which costs nothing in comprehension. Pope's freedom with the Greek is consistent and intentional. He adds images, adjusts the syntax for his couplets, and elevates the register throughout, which gives the poem a grandeur that some readers find sustaining over 24 books. What it costs is closeness to what Homer actually says. Jordan stays much nearer the Greek. In the Book 9 passage, Homer's Achilles presents his two fates in plain parallel terms, and Jordan reproduces that plainness: "I will die soon but my fame will never die, / yet if I return home to my fatherland / I will forfeit glory, but gain long life." Pope compresses to six lines and keeps the logic but smooths the repetition. Jordan's version reads as a working translation; Pope's reads as an English poem inspired by Homer. Neither disguises what it is.
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!
Sing, goddess, of Peleus' son Achilles' anger,
ruinous, that caused the Greeks untold ordeals,
consigned to Hades countless valiant souls,
heroes, and left their bodies prey for dogs
or feast for vultures. Zeus's will was done
from when those two first quarreled and split apart,
the king, Agamemnon, and matchless Achilles.