George Chapman published his translation of the Iliad, in installments, beginning in 1598, published in "fourteeners", a long-line ballad metre that "has room for all of Homer's figures of speech and plenty of new ones, as well as explanations in parentheses. At its best, as in Achilles' rejection of the embassy in Iliad Nine; it has great rhetorical power."[68]: 351 It quickly established itself as a classic in English poetry. In the preface to his own translation, Pope praises "the daring fiery spirit" of Chapman's rendering, which is "something like what one might imagine Homer, himself, would have writ before he arrived at years of discretion."
John Keats praised Chapman in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816). John Ogilby's mid-17th-century translation is among the early annotated editions; Alexander Pope's 1715 translation, in heroic couplet, is "The classic translation that was built on all the preceding versions,"[68]: 352 and, like Chapman's, it is a major poetic work in its own right. William Cowper's Miltonic, blank verse 1791 edition is highly regarded for its greater fidelity to the Greek than either the Chapman or the Pope versions: "I have omitted nothing; I have invented nothing," Cowper says in prefacing his translation.
In the lectures On Translating Homer (1861), Matthew Arnold addresses the matters of translation and interpretation in rendering the Iliad to English; commenting upon the versions contemporarily available in 1861, he identifies the four essential poetic qualities of Homer to which the translator must do justice:
[i] that he is eminently rapid; [ii] that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; [iii] that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, [iv] that he is eminently noble.
After a discussion of the metres employed by previous translators, Arnold argues for a poetical dialect hexameter translation of the Iliad, like the original. "Laborious as this meter was, there were at least half a dozen attempts to translate the entire Iliad or Odyssey in hexameters; the last in 1945. Perhaps the most fluent of them was by J. Henry Dart [1862] in response to Arnold."[68]: 354 In 1870, the American poet William Cullen Bryant published a blank verse version, that Van Wyck Brooks describes as "simple, faithful."
An 1898 translation by Samuel Butler was published by Longmans. Butler had read Classics at Cambridge University, graduating in 1859.[69]
Since 1950, there have been several English translations: Richmond Lattimore's version (1951) is "a free six-beat" line-for-line rendering in often unidiomatic, often archaic English. Robert Fitzgerald's version (Oxford World's Classics, 1974) uses shorter, mostly iambic lines and numerous allusions to earlier English poetry.
Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990) and Stanley Lombardo (1997) are bolder than Lattimore in adding more contemporary American-English idioms to convey Homer's conventional and formulaic language. Rodney Merrill's translation (University of Michigan Press, 2007) renders the work in English verse like the dactylic hexameter of the original.
Peter Green translated the Iliad in 2015, a version published by the University of California Press.
Caroline Alexander published the first full-length English translation by a woman in 2015.[70]
Emily Wilson's 2023 translation uses unrhymed iambic pentameters.[71][72]
