Who Is America’s Homer?

You have{{score}} free articles remaining.This is some text inside of a div block.This is some text inside of a div block.Walt WhitmanJoseph M. Keegin[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Homer and Hesiod,[.small-caps] Hegel notes, “gave to the Greek gods their names and their form,” but only the former concerned himself too with heroes. Both of Homer’s great poetic epics open with divine invocations directed at human objects: “Sing the rage of Achilles, goddess,” Homer demands at the outset of the Iliad; “Tell me of the man, Muse,” begins the Odyssey. Several centuries later, Virgil starts his self-consciously Homeric fabrication of the founding of Rome by pulling poetry down from the heavens: “I sing” – no longer the gods – “of arms and the man.” Nearly two millennia later, a poor, barely-schooled Quaker’s son writing from “this puzzle, the New World,” the “athletic Democracy” unfolding an ocean away from all known civilization, made himself both singer and song: “One’s-self I sing.”[.article__paragraph--cap]Thus Walt Whitman, too, named for the Americans their hero and their god. We are, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, natural Cartesians: “In most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.” I think, therefore I am American. We are a nation of isolatoes, in Melville’s phrasing; an entire country corrupted by Socratic skepticism and folded inward by Luther’s doctrine of the heart. In earlier times, this made America a Petri dish of Protestantisms – more recently, it has made us the world’s greatest exporter of breaking news (as Hegel observed, modern man’s lauds) and all varieties of moralism, egoist occultism, and psychotherapy.

Whitman presages this all.What do you suppose creation is?What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God?And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?For this, he is our Homer.Robert FrostDana Gioia[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In my years of public life,[.small-caps] I did hundreds of interviews. No matter what the topic – arts funding, education, reading trends, government policy – the reporter would usually ask me one of two questions, “Who is your favorite poet?” “Who is the greatest American poet?” At first, I responded by declaring the impossibility of answering either question. How tiresome I was, responding to a simple question by quibbling about its premise! It gradually occurred to me that the reporters were just being friendly. They didn’t know much about poetry; they were trying to open a personal conversation about the art. I relaxed and gave them answers.[.article__paragraph--cap]My first answer always disappointed them. Favorite poet? “Shakespeare… sorry.” How boring! The second question was harder to answer. At least a dozen major American poets came to mind – Longfellow, Whitman, Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot, Jeffers, Millay, Hughes. (Not to mention great writers who worked both in prose and verse, especially Emerson and Poe.) And that only brings us up to the middle of the last century! Which writer was the greatest? Who, then, is our Homer?I wanted to answer the question in a way I could explain, though as it turned out, no reporter ever asked about my rationale. I settled the question (at least for myself) using five criteria – poetic excellence, thematic depth, creative abundance, literary versatility, and historical precedence. Let me explain the last criterion first. Our “greatest poet” needed to be foundational; that poet needed to make his or her mark on the tradition early, before it was fully formed.

Homer appeared at the start of Greek literature, not toward the end.For excellence, everyone in my top dozen qualifies. They wouldn’t have made the list otherwise. For thematic depth, most of them do very well too. No one would accuse Jeffers, Eliot, Hughes, or the others of talking about shallow subjects. Longfellow was excellent and foundational, but his optimistic imagination could not encompass tragic themes. Abundance eliminated only Eliot, a parsimonious poet, who let criticism replace verse in his later career.That brought the final decision to versatility. Wallace Stevens was a sublime author, but he spent most of his career writing variations of the same supreme poem. I would make similar criticisms of Whitman, Robinson, Jeffers, and Eliot. Neither Poe nor Emerson had much versatility; their obsessions were part of their strength. Likewise, Millay and Hughes were at their best in short poems on certain characteristic subjects.For me, the final choice came down to Dickinson or Frost – the weird power couple of American poetry. Ultimately I chose Frost because only he wrote with equal authority in all four modes of literature: the comic, tragic, satiric, and romantic. He also wrote, at the highest level of excellence, both lyric and narrative poems. No other poet equals Frost’s creative range.Finally, Frost wrote in ways that appealed to the common reader as well as the literati. When American students are asked to name their favorite poem in the English language, they consistently choose “Fire and Ice.” When instructors name their favorite poem to teach, they inevitably select “The Road Not Taken.” I understand those two choices. I loved Frost at fifteen. I still love him at seventy-five. He covered a lot of territory with me and always had something indispensable to offer.Herman MelvilleZena Hitz[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In the first volume[.small-caps] of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville gently mocks the heroism typical of Americans: “During a crossing of eight or ten months [the American navigator] has drunk brackish water and lived on salted meat; he has fought constantly against the sea, against disease, against boredom; but upon his return he can sell a pound of tea for one penny less than the English merchant.

The goal is reached.”[.article__paragraph--cap]How could the humble hero of commerce, the American sailor, be glorified? He bears no carved shield or helmet. His lance is a whaler’s lance, for butchering the great whales so as to boil down their oil for the market. Herman Melville hangs mystery like Blake and tears it down like Cervantes. His restless schoolmaster, Ishmael, goes to sea for wisdom, but he is too savvy to get carried away by his own poetry. The voyage of the Pequod is America’s greatest quest, the search for meaning. What wisdom is won from the terror of the hunt or the tedium of butchery? Enchantment descends when Ahab calls for the death of the white whale. It recedes in the cycle of whale-sighting, the chase, geysers of blood, cutting and processing. Each majestic whale lights up dollar signs in second-mate Stubb’s eyes. The mists of enchantment return as the erstwhile whale-butchers gaze in awe at a pacific nursery protected by circling whale bulls. They scratch the head of the baby whale whose umbilical cord still hangs in the water. An episode or two later a whaleboat on the chase abandons young Pip, a rookie oarsman, on the sea for hours. Floating in emptiness, he sees the busy heartlessness of nature. He loses his wits and never recovers. Ishmael imagines his way into the heart of each sailor and the particular ghosts and dreams of each. The enchantment of Moby-Dick is not allegory or “symbolism” or anything so crass, but the enchantment of the longings of the human heart for beauty, peace, wisdom, understanding, adventure, grandeur, courage, and immortality.Tracy ChapmanEmily Wilson[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Who is the American Homer?[.small-caps] The original Greek Iliad and Odyssey are monumental texts, based on a centuries-long preexisting oral poetic tradition – and the epics themselves were usually experienced in antiquity out loud, as rhythmical, proto-dramatic, musical performance pieces.

There were numerous musical and poetic genres in archaic Greece; the Homeric poems are primarily “epic” – glorious, gripping narratives of the mythical “deeds of men” (klea andron). But these poems also draw on other poetic and musical traditions, such as lament. So an American Homer would have to be a lyricist, singer, poet, or quasi-epic writer who encapsulates, transforms, and canonizes a set of earlier American oral traditions, and also speaks to core American values and experiences. There are many musical traditions in the American cultural bloodstream: spirituals, Gospel, blues, folk music, railroad songs, sea shanties, and more.[.article__paragraph--cap]The Homeric poems were composed at a time when Greek speakers from different regions of the Mediterranean world were beginning to form a new awareness of their “Pan-Hellenic,” unified identity. By contrast, the United States, since the time of its founding, has retained deep and painful racial and regional divisions – so it’s hard to think of an artist who resonates equally across white and Black America, across rural and urban communities, and across both North and South. Some obvious candidates for such musical American Homers include Ma Rainey, Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, and Nina Simone – Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and John Prine.But if we want a single American epic song, I’d nominate Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” whose multiple covers (including by male and white artists) showcase its ability to speak to the broader American cultural experience, and the tragic gap between aspiration and achievement. To my ear, Chapman’s original 1988 version is still, forever, the best. Her wonderfully controlled structure tells a heartbreaking narrative that lasts less than five minutes, but gestures at an epic narrative. Like the Homeric poems, the song makes powerful use of repetition and formulaic language: simple repeated words take on new meanings on later iterations: work, drunk, got, feeling, belong, away, you, me, somewhere, anywhere. The desire for eternal kleos drives the Homeric warrior; Chapman’s speaker is driven by the desire to “be someone, be someone,” and for her, as for Achilles and Hector, the stakes are life or death: “Leave tonight or live and die this way.”