5x15 Special: Alice Oswald on Poetry, Homer & The Classical World

"I've always felt that Homer is a contemporary poet, an avant-garde poet... Homer's poetry is more alive than a lot of what we read as poetry nowadays." Alice Oswald

Why have certain texts, like the Odyssey and the Iliad, survived for thousands of years?

After a lifetime of thinking about the poetry of the classical world, the award-winning poet Alice Oswald began exploring this question during her appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

What emerged was an extraordinary story, of an oral tradition drawn from everyday speech and the wild sounds of the natural world. Not a dead language, but a literary form that is both embodied and alive, and continues to speak to us today, in our beleaguered present.