What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said: "Now
let us write an epic." Conditions would be against it. A
wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law
applies: that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single
sitting. The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of
spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great
poet will be a unity of spirit.

Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a
great poet--whose name may not have been Homer--that may have
been only _what he was called_--his real name may have been (if
the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or
Brown, or Robinson--but he was _called_ Homer anyhow--why should
we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one
great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete
poem; ten years later another incident; and again, after an
interval, another? Each time with the intention to make a
complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by
the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or
god, now with another. The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote
the fairylike _Lady of Shalott,_ was a very different man in mood
and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the
execrable _Merlin and Vivien;_ but both were possessed with the
Arthurian legend. At thirty and at fifty you may easily take
different views of the same men and incidents. The Iliad, I
suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems
and many moods and periods of life of a single poet. It was not
until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into
a single epic.