A note about the canon of great literature reminds me that there’s an interesting symposium in Plough magazine on “Who is America’s Homer?” The subhead frames the question:
If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?
People made cases for names you’d expect (Whitman and Frost) and for some you might not (Tracy Chapman). I was pleased that William Carlos Williams came up.
But it seemed to me that the best arguments were made by those who said America doesn’t have a Homer.
Christian Wiman, a poet I admire, mentioned a more recent set of poets that included Heaney of Ireland, Milosz of Poland and Akhmatova of Russia. As Wiman put it, “all of these writers speak from and to a coherent culture.”
The notion that American culture could be coherent was intriguing.
• Source: “Who is America’s Homer?”; Plough, June 24, 2026. It’s here:
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