Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

Later he was an instructor at Sarah Lawrence and Princeton University poetry editor of The New Republic. Translators David Grene Robert Fitzgerald Elizabeth Wyckoff. He succeeded Archibald MacLeish as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard in 1965 and served until his retirement in 1981.

In addition he also composed several books of his own poetry. Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (12 October 1910 – 16 January 1985) was a poet critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students.