The Odyssey recounts Odysseus's ten-year return voyage from Troy to his kingdom of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope has been fending off suitors consuming his estate, and where his son Telemachus is just coming of age. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with Telemachus, who must hear news of his father from the goddess Athena and travel to gather information from Menelaus and Nestor. Odysseus himself is introduced only in Book Five, stranded on the island of the nymph Calypso. From there the poem follows him through the Phaeacians' hospitality, his recounted adventures, Cyclops, Circe, the land of the dead, Scylla and Charybdis, and his return to Ithaca disguised as a beggar.
The Odyssey is usually read as a homecoming story, but it is equally a poem about identity and disguise. Odysseus is defined throughout by his capacity for strategic deception, he is polytropos, "of many turns," in the poem's second word, a description that is simultaneously his greatest gift and his most morally ambiguous quality. He lies to almost everyone he encounters in Ithaca, including Penelope, as a test and as protection. Penelope's own strategic deceptions, unraveling the shroud she has been weaving for Laertes as a pretext to delay the suitors, establish her as Odysseus's intellectual equal, the only character in the poem whose intelligence is an explicit match for his.
The scene where Odysseus weeps silently at the bard's song in the Phaeacian court, covering his face so no one sees his grief, compresses several of the poem's central preoccupations into a single gesture: the veteran's isolation inside experience that cannot be communicated, the pleasure and pain of art that returns the listener to what they have lost. The poem is more interested in domestic life, in hospitality's obligations, and in the texture of specific longing than the epic frame might suggest, and it is that human scale that makes it immediate across the three thousand years since its composition.
Walt Whitman self-published the first Leaves of Grass in 1855 and set some of the type himself.
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