alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
Twain 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.
I 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.
The 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Whitman 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?
Literally came to say the same... Mark Twain was my first thought here.
I 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.
But 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.
It’s obviously Twain.
Tis 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.
If 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.
Twain 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.
Poe
Twain
> 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
This 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.