The Odyssey1616 · public domain
The first complete English Homer, and a monument. Chapman’s long fourteener lines are dense, energetic, and thoroughly Elizabethan, the version that made Keats feel like an astronomer spotting a new planet. It is hard going for a modern reader, archaic and knotty, and freer with the sense than a scholar would like. Approach it as a great English poem of 1616 rather than a study text. Public domain.