MemorialAlice Oswald Matthew Arnold praised the "Iliad" for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war dead, most of whom are