His primeval savagery is almost equally unpresentable.

What civilized poet can don the barbarian sufficiently to revel, or seem to revel, in the ghastly details of carnage, in hideous wounds described with surgical gusto, in the butchery of captives in cold blood, or even in those particulars of the shambles and the spit which to the troubadour of barbarism seem as delightful as the images of the harvest and the vintage?
Poetry can be translated into poetry only by taking up the ideas of the original into the mind of the translator, which is very difficult when the translator and the original are separated by a gulf of thought and feeling, and when the gulf is very wide, becomes impossible.

There is nothing for it in the case of Homer but a prose translation.

Even in prose to find perfect equivalents for some of the Homeric phrases is not easy.

Whatever the chronological date of the Homeric poems may be, their political and psychological date may be pretty well fixed.