Homer's "Iliad" is the founding poem of Western literature — the Trojan War is its subject, and every poet writing about war writes in Homer's shadow; A student poet might write "they fought ten years over a beautiful woman and came home to find their own lives in ruins — Troy is the story of what obsession costs" to use the war as a meditation on desire; Marlowe's "Dr Faustus" contains the most famous allusion: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" — Helen as a measure of catastrophic beauty; Seamus Heaney's translation work and his epic sensibility connect him to the Trojan tradition — poets who translate Homer bring the war's dust into the present; A poet writing "every Troy has its Helen and its Cassandra — the one whose beauty starts the war and the one whose truth no one will hear until it is too late"