There was a lot of telling going and very little showing,
See, intellectually, this is what interests me, because epic and drama are in these terms antithetical--epic is *all* about the telling, it's what epic *is*, and drama is about the showing. So Homer isn't, despite the great descriptions in the poem, *dramatic*, so to speak--it's essentially a mediated form, right? where an actor/speaker *tells* the audience of the action. To show Homer is, I think, to lose what's interesting about Homer in a weird way. To see a sword fight isn't the same as hearing about it in this case. So in an odd way, the telling you're describing is probably right, much like Olivier always stopped the camera and gave you nothing to look at during the really important soliloquies in whatever Shakes. film. He wants you to be told, hear the words, and not *watch action*.
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See, intellectually, this is what interests me, because epic and drama are in these terms antithetical--epic is *all* about the telling, it's what epic *is*, and drama is about the showing. So Homer isn't, despite the great descriptions in the poem, *dramatic*, so to speak--it's essentially a mediated form, right? where an actor/speaker *tells* the audience of the action. To show Homer is, I think, to lose what's interesting about Homer in a weird way. To see a sword fight isn't the same as hearing about it in this case. So in an odd way, the telling you're describing is probably right, much like Olivier always stopped the camera and gave you nothing to look at during the really important soliloquies in whatever Shakes. film. He wants you to be told, hear the words, and not *watch action*.