Before I likely disappear for a week or two, I wanted to mention that back in June I ran across (via The Hinternet) a little symposium in Plough magazine in which a number of writers and public intellectuals gave their opinion about which author might be the American Homer. Dana Gioia plunked for Robert Frost, A.E. Stallings for Laura Ingalls Wilder, Zena Hitz for Herman Melville, Ross Barkan for Hart Crane, Joseph Keegin for Walt Whitman, etc. You get the picture.
Now, strictly speaking there can be no American Homer because, as Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated, the quasi-historical Homer was merely an especially impressive singer of tales within a completely oral tradition, whose performances were somehow transcribed into written form but who was not an author in the modern or even classical sense. Thus - again, strictly speaking - Virgil is not the Roman Homer, Dante is not the Italian Homer, and Shakespeare is not the English Homer. However, if we loosen the reins slightly we can see that each of these great writers holds a position analogous to that of Homer in ancient Greece, for each was a formative influence on both the language and the culture of his nation.
Thus the task of identifying an American equivalent of Homer seems not entirely illegitimate. Ideally, we'd be seeking an author who composed epics in the broad definition put forth by the late Frederick Turner, preferably in verse although prose would be acceptable. This removes lyric poets like Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson from the contest, as well as novelists like Laura Ingalls Wilder (or was it really her daughter Rose Wilder Lane??). But instead of seeking one American Homer, we might find it more productive to identify two great American books that are similar in some ways to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Since the Iliad is the Greeks' great saga of war and conflict, I suggest Melville's Moby-Dick - that epic telling of the Pequod crew's battles with Leviathan - as a kind of American Iliad; and since the Odyssey is the Greeks' great saga of exploration and adventure, I suggest Whitman's Leaves of Grass - one great American's exploration of self and democracy - as a kind of American Odyssey.
Inspired by this line of thinking, we might also wonder: who is the American Sappho - the great celebrant of the inner life of the individual? Although a case could be made for Edna St. Vincent Millay, to my mind it's no contest: Emily Dickinson.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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