Pope writes in heroic couplets, a form fashionable in early eighteenth-century England, which gives his verse a consistent formal pressure. His lines run long and rhetorical: "Short is my date, but deathless my renown" (Book 9) has a balance and snap that comes from the couplet's shape, not from Homer's Greek. The diction is elevated throughout, with "direful spring," "Pluto's gloomy reign," and "foredoom'd" signaling a classical English register that keeps readers at a ceremonial distance. Wilson writes in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, with a contemporary vocabulary. In Book 21 she gives Achilles "So die, my friend. Why are you so upset?" The bluntness is deliberate: short words, direct address, present-tense feeling. Pope's translation was made for readers who valued eloquence and public performance. He adds, adjusts, and decorates: in Book 5, Athena's speech becomes "Rash, furious, blind, from these to those he flies," an appositive Pope invented to fill the couplet. Wilson stays much closer to the Greek line order and word count. In Book 6, Homer's leaves simile runs six lines in Greek; Pope expands and regularizes it into a near-epigram, while Wilson keeps it rougher and more compressed: "The wind shakes some to earth." Pope's readers get a polished period artifact; Wilson's readers get something that moves faster and makes fewer concessions to formal elegance. Each choice costs something.
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!
Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath
of great Achilles, son of Peleus,
which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain
and sent so many noble souls of heroes
to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs,
a banquet for the birds, and so the plan
of Zeus unfolded—starting with the conflict
between great Agamemnon, lord of men,
and glorious Achilles.