A、The Iliad was written after the Odyssey. B、The first European poems weren’t writtenin Greek. C、The poet called Homer wrote the

We’re going to start our discussion of poetry in Western Europe with thelliad and the Odyssey. These two great poems stand out as great examples of the earliest Europeans poems. They are believed to have been written sometime between 800BC and 700BC, partly because the poems refer to the social conditions of that time, conditions that have been validated by the findings of archeologists. But just who was the poet who laid down these cornerstones of western literature? Tradition ascribes them to a man named Homer, but we know virtually nothing about this Homer. In fact, some say that such a poet never existed at all, that neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was written by a single poet, but rather each poem is composed of the writings of several people. This, anyway, is the view of a school of literary critics in the 18th century known as the Analysts. The Analysts pointed to internal evidence such as variations in the literary devices used in the poem to argue that each work as in fact a collection of several poems by several Greek authors. Opposing the analysts were a second group of scholars called the Unitarian. They insisted that the Iliad and the Odyssey couldweldthe work of single poetic genius. To support their argument, they stress among other things the consistency of the character portrayed in the poetry. This wouldn’t have been possible, they said, if they were written by many different poets. Now how we look at the Homeric question today has been greatly influenced by someone named Milkman Parry, an American scholar who first presented his ideas about Homer in the 1930s. So let’ s take a look at Parry’s research and how it affects what modem day scholars think about Homer. Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 22 to 25.
22. What aspect of the Iliad and the Odyssey does the professor mainly discuss?
23. According to the professor, what is one of the claims made by the analysts?
24. According to me Unitarians, what is one type of evidence that a single poet could have writtenboth the Iliad and the Odyssey?
25. What will the professor probably talk about next?