Homer’s ghost is particularly busy, popping up in the dreams of pretty much every poet going. In fact if you are a poet and haven’t been visited by Homer, you may find yourself wondering why you’ve been left out.

The cultural reach of the two major poems that appear under Homer’s name – the Iliad and the Odyssey – is undeniable. I teach my creative writing students that there are only two stories: the siege and the journey, and there they are, right at the beginning of literary history. They’ve been read continuously for centuries. On my shelves is an edition of Alexander Pope’s Iliad which belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, in which are still bits of paper put in by subsequent family members. These days, social media is awash with comments on Emily Wilson’s translation, or the latest film by Christopher Nolan.

Henry Power’s engaging and witty book describes how and why Homer has been received and transmuted over the centuries: how translators grappled with problems of alienation from the subject matter; how their circumstances affected their practice; and how each subsequent translator or adapter used the work of those who had gone before. The book’s title comes from the poet Michael Longley, who had been ‘Homer-haunted for 50 years’. Power (Homer-haunted, too, since the age of eight) read Classics and English at Oxford and draws the reader on through the tale with aplomb.

He contends that Homer was not a single poet but ‘the tradition that generated these poems’, seeing them as containing multitudes of voices. Fair enough; but I’m with the poet A.E. Stallings on this: there is a controlling poetic intelligence which imposes unity on the whole. The Iliad is about the transfer of bodies, beginning with the priest Chryses asking for his daughter back, and ending with Priam bringing his dead son Hector home. It is hard to believe that such mirrorings came about by committee.

There are lots of pleasing nuggets, such as that Lucian of Samosata claimed to have descended to the underworld to meet Homer. On Lucian asking the poet why he’d begun the Iliad with Achilles’s wrath, Homer answered: ‘It was the first thing that popped into my head.’ In a later chapter on Matthew Arnold, I learned that Cardinal Newman’s younger brother was ‘the first (and so far only) person to translate Robinson Crusoe into Latin’. (You can find it online; it’s fab.)

I hadn’t known that the first translation of the Iliad was in 1526 – into modern Greek, by Nikolaos Loukanis; nor that before George Chapman’s masterful 16th-century English version, the MP Arthur Hall had made a ‘faltering attempt’. This is how he rendered the opening lines:

I thee beseech, O Goddess mild, the hateful hate

to plain,

Whereby Achilles was so wrong, and grew in

such disdain.

You can see why it didn’t catch on.

Chapman translated Homer for money – as a second son, Power notes, he inherited £100 and two spoons. His version, so important to John Keats,

brings Homer home… Nausicaa plays cricket on the beach… Agamemnon kicks a severed head like a football… Odysseus visits his father on the allotment and finds him wearing ‘thornproof hedging mittens’.

Pope, unlike Chapman, became a millionaire from his Homeric translations, even hiring two lesser poets to help him with the titanic task. And it’s his version rather than Chapman’s that proved most popular over the years, despite its reputation for not capturing the poem’s ‘wildness’. Power defends Pope, noting that he in fact popularised the notion of Homer’s ‘otherness’, and all he was doing was attempting, like Chapman, to suit the poem to his own times.

The account of Keats’s engagement with the Iliad is enthralling, and Power’s exegesis of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ opens it up in original ways.

As Power takes us through the 20th century and on, the book quickens pace. We positively hurtle through H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, Christopher Logue’s innovative deployment of collage in War Music, Thom Gunn’s homoerotics, and Derek Walcott’s post-colonial approach in Omeros. David Melnick’s homophonic version, which uses the sounds of Homeric Greek (‘Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles!’ is the first line), seems inventive but crazy. It was fun to learn about Stallings’s obsession with Homeric equids, and I would have liked more on Alice Oswald’s mysterious, vatic Memorial, which foregrounds the similes for which Homer is so celebrated, alongside the deaths of all the soldiers.

I don’t agree with everything that Power suggests. That Polyphemus is the victim of the colonising Odysseus seems particularly far-fetched, as the Cyclopes were not peace-loving farmers, but attacked their neighbours, the Phaeacians. Also, Polyphemus is quite clearly monstrous. Throughout, though, Power is a highly sensitive and winningly inquisitive reader. He has lucidly synthesised masses of texts and has shown that we can never lay Homer’s ghost to rest. And why would we, when he contains such multitudes?