The Poetry Codex blog
Notes from the Codex
- The World's Great Epics: A Reading List2026-10-20 · A guided tour of 30 great epics in the Poetry Codex, from Gilgamesh to Aurora Leigh, with the translation we recommend and a study guide for each.
- How to Read Paradise Lost: A Beginner's Guide2026-10-20 · Why Milton's epic feels hard, how to read it without losing heart, the shape of its twelve books, and what to read alongside it.
- Ten Turkish Poems Every Reader Should Know2026-10-20 · Ten poems from seven centuries of Turkish poetry in the Poetry Codex, from Yunus Emre to Orhan Veli, each with a few lines, a gloss and a word of context.
- What Is an Epic? From Gilgamesh to Gondibert2026-10-20 · What makes a poem an epic: the classic definitions, the conventions from invocation to machinery, and how poets from Virgil to Elizabeth Barrett Browning remade the form.
- Which Translation of the Iliad Should You Read?2026-10-20 · A guide to the ten classic English Iliads in the Poetry Codex, from Chapman's 1611 fourteeners to Murray's 1924 Loeb prose, and who each one suits.