Who Is America's Homer?

The Plough magazine article, "Who Is America's Homer?", presents a fascinating collection of essays from various literary figures, each nominating a different artist or body of work as the American equivalent of the Greek epic poet. The central premise explores how an individual or creative output could encapsulate the vast, diverse, and often contradictory experiences of the American nation, drawing parallels with the foundational role of Homer's epics in Greek culture.

• Walt Whitman is proposed for his self-identification as both singer and song, capturing the American ethos of individual effort and democratic spirit, even presaging the nation's isolatoes and varied moralisms.
• Robert Frost is championed for his poetic excellence, thematic depth, versatility across literary modes (comic, tragic, satiric, romantic), and his ability to appeal to both common readers and literati.
• Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is presented as America's greatest quest, translating the humble heroism of commerce and the search for meaning into a profound, enchanting narrative of human longing against a backdrop of terror and tedium.
• Tracy Chapman's song "Fast Car" is nominated for its ability to speak to a broad American cultural experience, capturing the tragic gap between aspiration and achievement, akin to an epic narrative in a modern form.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books are seen as a true national epic, an odyssey of homecoming over the horizon, with an oral tradition's formulaic simplicity and a narrative that grapples with progress, exploitation, and the taming of the wild.
• William Carlos Williams is recognized for his ability to capture the real world of America, its material aspects, meanings, promises, and failures, through humble yet emotionally deep language, making the ordinary epic.
• Hart Crane is put forth as a Romantic poet who, in The Bridge, attempted to create a polyphonic epic that grappled with the scope of national history, embodying the American sublime.
• Several essays conclude that America may not have a Homer yet, citing the nation's youth, immense diversity, and the idea that true epics often emerge from civilizational collapse or profound transformation, a stage America is only now approaching.

The diverse selections highlight the complexity of defining a single unifying voice for a nation as varied as the United States, suggesting that the very act of seeking an American Homer reflects an ongoing quest for national identity through literature.