Who Is America's Homer? Four Perspectives on the Nation's Greatest Poet
Four distinguished writers debate who truly embodies the spirit of the American Homer. Joseph M. Keegin champions Walt Whitman for his democratic self-singing, while Dana Gioia selects Robert Frost for his unparalleled versatility across literary modes. Zena Hitz argues for Herman Melville's profound exploration of the human heart, and Emily Wilson suggests Tracy Chapman as the modern lyricist who captures our shared oral traditions.
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God?
- bryanrasmussen
I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in.
I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it.
Hart Crane at this point in time seems somewhat secondary, so that was surprising.
The Tracy Chapman thing seemed seriously like a troll, I could definitely agree to a black Homer, but then I guess it would be Langston Hughes or James Baldwin as my choices.
To suggest someone though who has the name recognition for American literature that Homer had for the Greeks, it would need to be Twain. You can't really have a great national writer that hardly anybody in the nation can name.
- paxys
"America's Homer" isn't someone you pick by committee. The fact that you have to debate means that this person does not exist. The American literary tradition is far too new for someone to have the kind of impact as others on the list. We are talking about people who, through their writing, created and evolved language itself.
No single author has defined how America speaks and writes the way Dante did for Italian or Cervantes for Spanish. And perhaps no one ever will.
- slwvx
Mark Twain is America's Homer
One aspect of Huckleberry Finn (the novel) that I think is relevant today is the spectacularly stupid zero-sum conflict between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. It seems relevant to the US's politics and many international conflicts
- freetime2
Unfortunately that title is already reserved in the US for Homer Simpson.
- IMAYousaf
I love this thread and this question. I'm going to argue that it's Francis Ford Coppola. His Filmography in the 1970's I think captures America, the myth and the realities, for both their glamour and horror, better than anyone else before or after.
1972 -- The Godfather -- This encapsulates the American Dream better than anything else. It captures the arc of an immigrant story, of fitting in with America, and what it takes to succeed.
1974 -- The Conversation -- Chronicles where America is going as technology and politics changes and the impacts on our culture, through one man at the center of it.
1974 -- The Godfather Part II -- The story of an America and the image that it's built up, and the bloodshed necessary to both get there, and to cleanse its hands from the past.
1979 -- Apocalypse Now -- The sins of a nation that's ascended, and how the rest of the world must deal with America, and what it does to the psyche of those charged with empire building.
There's a body of work there that captures America in its totality more comprehensively than what anyone else has done. If I had to reduce this down to one choice, then it's simply The Godfather.
- legitster
The most technically correct answer is Walt Whitman.
Longfellow got dismissed by several people here for being too sentimental - but I would argue that sentimentality and saccharine character is distinctly part of America's mythos.
Washington Irving and Parson Weems would both also be good candidates. Early writers who had a penchant for mixing real history with tall tales.
The name I would throw out is John Ford. Ford basically invented the modern action movie, the mythology of the West, redefined masculinity, established the tropes of a hero, etc.
- Beijinger
easy one:
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Ernest Hemingway
- inopinatus
That would be the poet-king Yoyontzin¹, not any of these post-Columbus nitwits.