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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 tim
by bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
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.
- EGreg 3mo agoPoe Twain
- riffraff 3mo agoBut this is about poetry, would Twain qualify as a poet? My vote would go to Edgar Lee Masters because the spoon river anthology is one of the few poetry books I actually read, and it exemplifies a lot of the American spirit, IMVHO.
- FeteCommuniste 3mo agoThe vast majority of Cervantes's work was not in poetry, either. I think the idea is more "emblematic national storyteller" than poet in the narrow sense.
- maxerickson 3mo agoIt's at least arguably about storytelling. You don't sit around the fire talking in verse for your entertainment. For instance, one of Homer's works is in the news due to a film being made of it. I suppose that suggests the Coen brothers.
- bryanrasmussen 3mo agoWell, yes, the Coen brothers did do the best version of the Odyssey for screen after all.
- bsder 3mo agoIf you're going with songwriters grabbing epic snapshots of life, you're talking about songwriters in the class of Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince who wrote not just for themselves but others as well and were all pretty prolific in their output.
- legitster 3mo agoTwain is a good choice, but he also works against the mythology of America. His whole thing was popping bubbles and making grounded stories that work against the backdrop of Americana. Tracy Chapman is a pretty trolly answer, but I suspect the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.
- oliculipolicula 3mo agoHmm Wheres the evidence that Homer work ed for the mythology of Dark Age Greece? If you say its his popularity.. (I would cite the Cyclics as counter evidence) For filmmaker: itd have to be someone whom you can imagine (unironically) reconstructing Adams or other actual American heroes So.. Tom Hanks
- krapp 3mo agoAs far as I know, it's contested whether Homer even existed as an individual at all. "Homer" might be a collective title for various unknown authors.
- throw0101a 3mo ago> Tom Hanks Recency bias? Why not Jimmy Stewart? Gregory Peck? Humphrey Bogart? Paul Newman, Robert Redford?
- oliculipolicula 3mo agoNot really. He was executive producer of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(miniseries) And will be playing and producing Dodd. https://variety.com/2019/film/news/joe-wright-in-the-garden-of-beasts-tom-hanks-120315472/ https://variety.com/2019/film/news/joe-wright-in-the-garden-... Theme of his oevre is not-so-immortal American heroes and heroism through and through Except for Redford, the others don't have their own voice Edit: but Tom Hanks is really only barely getting by from Hollywood getting less repressive over time
- kstenerud 3mo ago
- paradox460 3mo agoTwain or Steinbeck. I'd say anyone else is folly
- cestith 3mo agoEven Bob Dylan?
- mythrwy 3mo agoEspecially Bob Dylan. Nasal whining isn't historical America.
- paradox460 3mo agoThe impact he had was substantial, but I don't rank him above Twain or Steinbeck. Aside, I do find it amusing when I go read old sf, like the ship who sang, and they mention"dylanists" as a serious movement
- cestith 3mo agoI’m not sure I’d rank him above either of those myself. Maybe not above Langston Hughes, Ray Bradbury, or Kurt Vonnegut personally. I was mostly asking about the anyone else being folly part. I think there are a few people who deserve to be in the same discussion is all.
- sva_ 3mo ago> I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it. Some of his works are already in the public domain in the US and can be found on Project Gutenberg, so you may not have to buy.
- etempleton 3mo agoThis falls into the great American author conversation and for that I would probably have to say Mark Twain or John Steinbeck. If you want to talk about lasting influence on the large literary world it is probably Edgar Allan Poe. Tracey Chapman is an all time great, but beyond a few song probably doesn’t rise to the American Homer status. I don’t think I would put a songwriter forward for that but if you did it would have to be Dylan.
- matt_daemon 3mo agoDylan came to mind after reading the Chapman answer, not least because of his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
- rayiner 3mo agoIt’s obviously Twain.
- cgyvbunji 3mo ago> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in Edit: Lots of hate here. The question was why people didn't suggest Twain to be "America's Homer", and I answered the question: Twain is controversial, at least for some schools, and for someone such as CK, which should tell you something. Let's try not to shoot the messenger. If you didn't balk when you reached this line the first time you read the book, there might actually be something wrong with you. "He [Mark Twain] also said 'There once was a man named [N-word] Jim,' so not everything he said was perfectly amazing" - Louis CK
- assimpleaspossi 3mo agoAnd you're going to quote a guy accused of sexual misconduct? CK will never be a Homer. But bringing that quote up from a piece of literature, not just something he said, is being ridiculous.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- somenameforme 3mo agoIt's also amazingly ignorant. The entire point of Jim in Huck Finn is the extreme irony between superficiality and reality. Everybody in Huck Finn is horrible, including Huck himself, yet they mostly all paint themselves as the most honorable and just of people - and in most cases probably believe it. The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book. It's a lesson about the difference between what people pretend to be like, and what they are really like. Which makes the critiques of the book, often focusing on pejoratives towards Jim, just so unbelievably ironic. It's the deterioration of thinking in society.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cgyvbunji 3mo ago> The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book Sure but you have to read the book first to know that, whereas the reader gets slapped in the face right away with the racial slur while reading the book for the first time, which is why some schools don't read Twain. This thread is about why people might not pick him to be the "America's Homer", I'm not trying to say anything more than that.
- anthuswilliams 3mo agoI had the same thought, but it appears they are explicitly asking about poets, not just literary figures and authors. Poe seems like an obvious candidate no one listed.
- bee_rider 3mo agoI think Tracy Chapman is not a troll choice, but a prediction. It is an interesting pick that highlights that highlights that all the picks are predictions, given the age of the country. I think it is probably not a prediction that will end up right, because music is sort of limited by changing musical styles. But it is an interesting one.
- lubujackson 3mo agoWhitman was first in my mind, he invented free verse poetry after all, embodying the American wilderness in form before content. If we are going to include musicians, Tracy Chapman indeed seems like a troll when have the significantly more impactful Bob Dylan, who dramatically altered the musical and political discourse at a key time in American history. Tracy Chapman... had a few good hits?
- larodi 3mo agoTis surely Twain, but come on, he came ages after Homer and came with civilisation that was not there in America when Homer lived. The whole idea for looking for America’s …Homer is just super bizarre. Modern (last 150-200 years) of America is not what it was thousands of years ago - it stands on the burial grounds of millions of indigenous people obliterated altogether with their cultural inheritance. It is questionable even today if American authors bear more the heritage of European literature than anything else. Homer was 2k years ago. Conquistadors made sure nothing would be left of anything that was 2k years ago. English and French, besides being smarter in the north, dis likewise. So your American Homer’s legacy perhaps lies buried down in some unmarked indigenous grave.
- graemep 3mo ago> So your American Homer’s legacy perhaps lies buried down in some unmarked indigenous grave. There are probably people similar to Homer in someways. However, the thing about Homer is that he influenced literature across most of Europe, North Africa, and much of the Middle East. I do not think any one culture in North America had the wide influence the Greeks did. > Homer was 2k years ago. Almost 3k years ago, and very likely to have just written down an existing oral tradition that could be much older. The historical events on which the story is based are about a half millennium earlier than Homer.
- skywhopper 3mo agoTwain seems the obvious choice, so yeah I’m disappointed they didn’t even mention him. Given that they invited submissions, I’d have loved to see a bigger variety, rather than two Frosts and two “no one”s. Those are both good choices, but not super interesting to read two of when other choices are left out.
- tracker1 3mo agoLiterally came to say the same... Mark Twain was my first thought here.
- pdonis 3mo ago> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in. Twain wasn't a poet. The article specifies right at the start that it's looking for a great American poet.
- deboboy 3mo agoThe lowest person in a society is a doorway to the structure of that society. Twain narrated this regardless of whether we consider it poetry or folkloric fiction.