Who is America’s Homer?
If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who does America have?
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In our Summer issue, Searching for the Soul of America, we asked if there is a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity in the same way that Homer does for Greece. Several suggestions were put forward by a posse of authors and poets.
Walt Whitman: Joseph Keegin
Robert Frost: Dana Gioia, A.M. Juster
Herman Melville: Zena Hitz
Tracy Chapman (particularly her song “Fast Car”): EMILY WILSON
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Ae Stallings
William Carlos Williams: Zito Madu
Hart Crane: Ross Barkan
Two poets, Jane Clark Scharl and Christian Wiman, even argued that America has no Homer. The symposium caused much discussion, with many arguing for names not included on the list: Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Bob Dylan. Someone even suggested Shelby Foote, but he seems more like America’s Herodotus or Thucydides than America’s Homer.
We’ve compiled some of the best responses below, including some further responses that we commissioned from Jason Blakely, Phil Klay, Nathan Beacom, and Hunter V. McClure.
But we also want to know what you think! Vote for who you think is America’s Homer here.
Bob Dylan is America’s Homer
By Jason Blakely
Of course, America has no Homer, and neither does any modern culture. But if I had to put forward a figure of the highest literary merit who – reminiscent of Homer – occupies a space of constant memorized, oral retelling of American lives and circumstances, it would undoubtedly be Bob Dylan. He unified the low and the high by taking French Symbolism, T. S. Eliot’s modernism, Walt Whitman’s explorations of the self, and Beat experimentations and fused them to the American songbook: the blues, country, and rock and roll. He returned poetry to the musical, bardic form that the Romantics had hoped for. As a gob smacked Allen Ginsberg described what he called “Dylan’s theory of singing or poetry”: it was to achieve “such a state of single-mindedness entering into his breath” as to become “one column of air.”
To a future generation, in a century or two, Dylan’s endlessly oral, iteratively expansive melding of the highest poetics to popular musical form may obviously place him in the literary canon. Melville and Shakespeare also took a while to catch on for being too “common” or “vulgar” in their art form, themes, tropes, and in their vernacular.
Of course, with any great artist we must avoid the ideological error of carving up their art into teams belonging to different ethnic groups and territorialized states. Great art is the common stock of all peoples and later generations. For example, there is a sense in which Shakespeare belongs to all English speakers and beyond as he also antedates nationalist ideology and cannot be contained in such walnut-sized divisions. He did help establish modern English, and in that sense all English-speaking countries are downstream from him. But he also spoke to literary artists who did not work in his language, from the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky to the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Dylan gets this humanistic common stock of all literature as he slyly implies in 1966’s Blonde on Blonde: “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells / Speaking to some French girl / Who says she knows me well.” In Dylan’s art Shakespeare happily flirts with the French.
Put more bluntly: Homer is America’s Homer and Shakespeare is America’s Shakespeare, and you can rejoice that you are human and not cut off from deepest resonance with their art due to accidents of language and birth. But if the point is just greatest literary talent North America has produced – the one who tells its odysseys of wandering individualism, suffering and redemption with the most color, variety and verve – then I return to Dylan. He is still in his own words, “bringing it all back home.”
No Mark Twain?
By Phil Klay
How outrageous, how offensive, I thought, that not one of the people Plough asked to name America’s Homer decided on Mark Twain. Not that I would have picked Twain myself. Obviously, the choice is Walt Whitman, who gives us the ideal, heroic American in grand style. But still, someone ought to have wrongly named Twain, for propriety’s sake. In Twain we find ourselves, the great American types penned so vividly they become foundational myths. Which makes him sound like our Homer, if not for the fact that Twain’s great characters are not kings or warriors but outcasts, vagabonds, con-men, and the occasional Connecticut Yankee. And he’s not writing in an epic style because he’s too goddamn American for that. He’s on another level entirely.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is America’s Homer
By Nathan Beacom
Who is America’s Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare? What each of those men had in common is that they were narrative poets; I was surprised, therefore, that in the responses, no narrative poets appeared.
In America, we have only one great narrative poet, and for that reason alone his name should be mentioned: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow was the most influential and popular American poet of the nineteenth century, read in almost every household and schoolroom. His long narrative poems The Courtship of Miles Standish, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and The Song of Hiawatha sought to paint a mythos of American origins. This last poem he wrote with the explicit dea of composing a national epic, and it is interesting that for this he chose to tell an indigenous story, replete with words in Ojibwe.
Perhaps most importantly, Longfellow is and was a people’s poet. Never the exclusive property of the academy, the urban salon, or the intellectual elites, he spoke to something in the ordinary, average American heart. A few years ago, I heard a college football coach tearfully quote him from memory. Each Christmas I hear his Civil War poem “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” in the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby. Some critics have chided him for his simplicity, but what we know about him from his contemporaries tells us that his sweet and sometimes simple poems came from a genuinely sweet and gentle heart.
In sum, because he is an epic poet, because he is a people’s poet, and because he sang an American mythos in order to uplift us into a better people, he ought to be in the conversation as America’s Homer.
The King James Bible is Our Homeric Text
By Hunter V. McClure
What did Homer give the Greeks? He gave them gods, heroic types, an account of the significance of human action in relation to divine drama. Said otherwise, Homer brought Greekness into being. Any attempt to name the American Homer must therefore search out a text that has done something similar in kind and in degree for our own national consciousness. The American Homer in the relevant sense must precede America, must condition the possibility of there even being an America; great as he is, Melville is a product of our tradition rather than its originating master-craftsman.
For this reason, only one text can seriously claim the title of “America’s Homer”: The King James Bible. It is there, especially in the Old Testament, that we find the sources for the stately heights of American rhetoric, the chiaroscuro of violence, the dread of being singled out by an alien God for a mission whose success is promised but never clearly and finally evidenced. When Lincoln sought to stir his countrymen, he employed the register of this Bible; in the most moving scenes of Absalom, Absalom! (our national Oresteia), it is the King James that is the constant point of reference. The product of English hands, the KJV is nevertheless most properly ours—the hope of Genesis and the doom of Judges would not find a fitting audience until meeting the bountiful floodplains of the Mississippi and walking among the mangled dead strewn at Antietam.
Best of the Rest
Whitman is our Homer
Melville our Aeschylus
Emerson our Plato
Grant our Thucydides
And Poe is our Edgar Allan Poe, because nobody else has anything like him.
Walt Whitman. No one else comes close.
Caitlin Flanagan picks a less popular choice:
Faulkner. No question
Steve Larkin debates the premise of the question:
It’s a ridiculous question. I am reminded of Ralph Wiley’s response to Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?”: Proust is the Proust of the Papuans. In the same spirit, Homer is the Homer of the Americans. Note also that in forming his questions Bellow mentions two non-Americans: attempt to answer “who is the Tolstoy of the Americans” and you might not like what you find….
Framing the question in this way is engaging in almost every American intellectual vice at once: A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again” – immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “what is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.
But, if we really have to do this, someone should have suggested that the American Iliad and the American Odyssey are not in fact by the same person.
Aaron Gwyn points to three authors:
America has three authors who produced epics in the Homeric mode: Melville with Moby Dick, Faulkner with As I Lay Dying, and Cormac McCarthy with Blood Meridian.
Henry Oliver argues for Hollywood!
I suggest Hollywood. I would certainly put the great directors ahead of Tracy Chapman on a list of people who “capture the American spirit, the American story, the American identity.” Surely John Ford and John Wayne are one obvious answer? Maybe Gone with the Wind. Frank Capra seems too uneven, but Billy Wilder might not be. What about Chaplin? Or Coppola? I don’t think Hitchcock has the necessary scale, somehow. Perhaps just “Hollywood’s Golden Age” as a whole is the best answer?
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This conversation has been so rich, and I find myself nearly changing my mind with every new argument. Ultimately, I think I land with their being no true American Homer. But if I had to pick, I might go with Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Winslow Homer, maybe?