Volume I
Books I–VI
ISBN: [ISBN]
Founding Edition · 2026
Portable standards
for lasting reading.
Compact books for readers who want to carry, mark, lend, reread, and keep them.
Pope's Odyssey is the founding edition of portable anglo standards. Homer’s Odyssey in the eighteenth-century English verse translation associated with Alexander Pope, presented complete in four pocket volumes.
The Pope Odyssey
A four-volume pocket edition.
Homer’s Odyssey is a poem of absence, hospitality, endurance, storytelling, disguise, recognition, and return.
This edition presents the complete epic in the English verse translation published in 1725–26 under Alexander Pope’s direction, with William Broome and Elijah Fenton. The poem is divided into four compact volumes of six books each, forming a continuous reading edition designed for the hand rather than the desk.
Four volumes. One voyage.
Pope’s Odyssey is not Homer made contemporary. It is Homer remade as an English poem: formal, energetic, social, and alive to ceremony, danger, appetite, persuasion, and homecoming. Its heroic couplets give the epic an unmistakably English movement—swift, balanced, and perhaps too-richly voiced.
Why Pope
An English encounter with Homer.
Modern readers have many excellent translations of Homer. This edition does not present Pope as a replacement for translations written for contemporary idiom, close engagement with Greek, or extensive scholarly annotation. It offers a different reading experience.
Pope’s Homer has long been contested because it is so visibly Pope: shaped by rhymed heroic couplets, Augustan rhetorical finish, and the literary manners of eighteenth-century English. Yet those qualities are also its claim on the reader. Pope’s Odyssey is one of the most consequential English encounters with Homer—a poem that turns the ancient voyage into a work of English sound, pace, wit, and formal pressure.
When Pope’s Odyssey appeared, English readers had Homer principally in verse. George Chapman, John Ogilby, and Thomas Hobbes had already produced English poetic versions; Pope did not introduce Homeric poetry to English readers, but brought it into the controlled couplet and public literary culture of his own age. Anne Dacier’s influential French prose Odyssey also helped define the European Homeric conversation into which Pope entered.
This is a reading edition: designed to make Pope’s English poem available in a form that can easily leave the shelf.
The four volumes
The journey in four movements.
| Volume | Books | Narrative movement |
|---|---|---|
| I | Books I–VI | Ithaca under pressure; Telemachus’s departure; the beginning of Odysseus’s return |
| II | Books VII–XII | Phaeacia and the great account of the wanderings: Cyclops, Circe, the dead, Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis |
| III | Books XIII–XVIII | Return to Ithaca; disguise, reconnaissance, hospitality, and recognition withheld |
| IV | Books XIX–XXIV | Penelope, the bow, recognition, reckoning, and restoration of the household |
Translators
The 1725–26 translation conventionally known as Pope’s Odyssey was a collaborative project. Alexander Pope translated twelve books, William Broome translated eight, and Elijah Fenton translated four. Pope directed the enterprise and gave the translation its recognizable overall style.
This edition credits all three collaborators and identifies the translator associated with each book in its editorial material.
Pope’s Homer: Four Readings
A small history of the argument.
Each volume includes a short editorial note and a selected historical response to Pope’s Homer. These texts do not settle the question of Pope’s translation; they show why it has remained a subject of admiration, resistance, and argument.
- Volume I
Joseph Spence, from An Essay on Mr. Pope’s Odyssey (1726–27) - Volume II
Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Pope and poetic diction - Volume III
William Blake on “improvement,” taste, and imaginative force - Volume IV
Samuel Johnson on Pope and the English poem
About Us
Books that can leave the shelf.
portable anglo standards publishes compact editions of enduring books. We are interested in works that remain culturally alive—books readers encounter through school, conversation, theatre, film, television, and the accumulated force of literary reputation.
Our editions join sound texts, editorial framing, and restrained book design. We believe canonical works need not arrive as classroom equipment or decorative luxury objects. They can be serious books for ordinary life: read on a train, carried on a trip, lent to a friend, returned to years later, and accumulated into a personal library.
Small format is not a novelty. It changes the relationship between a book and its reader. A pocket edition is made to move.
The first portable anglo standard is Pope's Odyssey. Future editions will extend the library through romance, theatre, essays, imaginative prose, and other works of enduring cultural life.
Editorial commitments
Sound texts.
Editorial framing.
Restrained design.
Books made to be carried, read, and kept.
Edition details
The practical particulars.
- Format
- Four paperback volumes
- Trim size
- 4 × 6 inches
- Typography
- Set in Minion Pro, Ten point
- Printing
- Black and white on cream groundstock paper
- Publisher
- portable anglo standards
- Publication date
- November 1, 2026
- ISBNs
- Volume I: [ISBN] · II: [ISBN] · III: [ISBN] · IV: [ISBN]
Editorial treatment, spelling policy, translator attribution, and the sources of supplementary materials are detailed in each volume.
Find the books
Published individually. Read together.
The four volumes may be ordered separately through booksellers, online retailers, and libraries. Ask for Pope's Odyssey: Pocket Edition, and the relevant volume number, or the ISBN.
Volume II
Books VII–XII
ISBN: [ISBN]
Volume III
Books XIII–XVIII
ISBN: [ISBN]
Volume IV
Books XIX–XXIV
ISBN: [ISBN]
Booksellers and libraries may order through Ingram.