We should not underestimate the effect on Pope's original poetry of the poet's translating virtually all of Homer. Pope had been thinking about the problems involved in translating Homer since at least his early twenties. Writing in 1708 to his friend Ralph Bridges, he mentions Homer's seemingly paradoxical combination of copious diction and noble simplicity. “The Episode of Sarpedon,” translated from Iliadxii and xvi, was published the following year. Four years later he proposed to translate the entire poem, which Lintot began to publish in 1715, when the first volume of the projected complete translation, containing Books i-iv, appeared. The final volume of the first edition was published in 1720. The Odyssey translation began appearing in 1725 and was completed the following year. This represents some sixteen years of a young poet's life - from the ages of twenty-one through thirty-seven - spent with Homer, as Pope repeatedly turned over the Greek lines in his head, struggled with how to translate them into readable and elegant English, and lived with the Homeric commentators and the Homeric characters.