Homer

Considered world literature's greatest poet along with Dante and Shakespeare, Homer is at the centre of Foscolo's theoretical thought on the relationship between poetry and society. Homeric poetry is a sublime manifestation of human civilization because it has performed the fundamental role of all literature: the transmission of civil, political, ethical and religious values. The main phases of Foscolo's thought, which he organized into a system of theory in the Pavia lectures, can be traced from various works and notes such as the Discorsi su Lucrezio and from Ortis, in which Jacopo is the interpreter of Foscolo's tastes: "Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, the three masters of all superhuman geniuses, have invested my imagination and inflamed my heart (“Omero, Dante e Shakespeare, tre maestri di tutti gl’ingegni sovrumani, hanno investito la mia immaginazione ed infiammato il mio cuore”, letter of May 13).

In Dei Sepolcri, Homer is introduced at the end of the poem's sequence of conceptual nuclei to testify to poetry's power to immortalize men and save them from oblivion and to the heroic, virtuous achievements of nations; the theme of immortalizing poetry is also present in Nè più mai toccherò le sacre sponde, in which Foscolo suggests there is a link between himself and the Greek poet, presented as the author of a canto in honour of Zante.

For this reason, the problem of translating Homer is central for Foscolo, who worked for over 20 years on the Italian version of the Iliad, composing countless segments that were continually being corrected and rewritten. Foscolo had profound respect for Homeric poetry, of which he wanted to conserve the authentic, pure spirit; the reader should have been able to appreciate in contemporary language the original beauty of the text via a faithful translation, but, at the same time an elegant, harmonious one capable of expressing the most profound meaning of the verses and the network of implied, allusive meanings. Therefore, it was a never-ending job and one that was never completed, documented by the incessant corrections and fed by continual research into the language that is reflected in Foscolo's poetry, especially in Dei Sepolcri and Le Grazie.