Canto I Themes

When you write a poem about journeying into the world of the dead, it's weird if the theme of mortality doesn't come up. But fear not, because there's more mortality in "Canto I" than you can shake...

Since the entirety of "Canto I" is basically being spoken by a first-person speaker in the past tense, we definitely get the sense that we're listening to Odysseus reminiscing, maybe at a really ol...

Well, when half of your friends are dead and there's no land in sight, suffering comes pretty naturally. And in "Canto I" such is the case for Odysseus and whoever is left of his crew. But the fun...

When it comes to being a friend, Odysseus is just about as loyal as any dude you'll ever meet. But forcing his entire crew to backtrack so they can bury a guy who got drunk and fell off a roof? Wel...

It's easy to lose context when you read "Canto I." Still, it's important to remember that, by this point in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew have just fought a war that took years to finish....