Yesterday I finished the second volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, and as I did, I made an important realization. Or rather, I read two things that made something click for me.

What I read was first this (emphasis mine):

"Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned fiction to apply the novelist's shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but The Iliad, and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design. Not by accident...but for cathartic effect is so much space given to the war's unwinding, it's final shudders and convulsions.... To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again." —Newsweek

and then this:

"Further afield, but no less applicable, Richard Lattimore's translation of the Iliad put a Greekless author in close touch with his model."  —Shelby Foote

What those passages made sense of was Foote's tendency to use certain phrases to decribe the same thing again and again. At first I ascribed it to an author running out of interesting synonyms over the course of a 3,000-page narrative, and frankly, I found it a little annoying. These two passages made me realize, however that when Foote repeated descriptions like "the Father of Waters" (the Mississippi River), "the red-haired Ohioan" (William Tecumsah Sherman), or "his taterdemalion army" (Lee's Army of Northern Viriginia), he intended them as epithets in the Homerian sense. And somehow, by knowing this, I didn't mind those repetitions. Instead I started to read them with an almost poetic cadence.

It's funny how a little context can change how you see something.