>>2070876Redundant? No... Maybe mentioning Ovid was silly, because he's not great, a little sort of facile and indulgent in his whimsy. I'll retroactively slip Vergil into that sentence if that's okay.
I mean as far as significance goes the two Homeric epics set up that dichotomy Western Literature has doggedly followed ever since, the one between freedom and inviduality (the Odyssey) and community and solidarity and civilisation (the Iliad). It's also a little uncharitable to consider them poems for the young; both have highly developed metaphysically aspects, the warrior culture in the Iliad, the individual and fate in the Odyssey (these are contiguous, I'll grant you that straight off the bat). That's not mentioning the glorious craft and those moments of pure brilliance; the rhetoric exchanged at the beginning of Iliad Book One, case in point.
Granted, this is coming from a person who's had much more access than average to the subtleties in Homer because I know the langauge.
The reason why I feel he has no place in my list is that Homer didn't perfectly match the spirit of poetry; poetry is always a solipsism and rarely a fable. Vergil was better on this account; there's this constant hint of sardonicism that threads the Aeneid, probably him chomping at the Augustinian party-line bit. This leads quite nicely to why I choose Chaucer; his irony is developed and directed and brilliant, all in the ways Vergil's wasn't free to be. As a narrative poet, I suppose he's still a figure in the old Homeric paradigm; but his judge of character that makes him a real poet and not a guileful prosaist.