1930s

We’re going to start our discussion of poetry in Western Europe with the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two great poems stand out as great examples of the earliest European poems. They are believed to have been written in some time between 800BC and 700BC, partly because the poems refer to the social conditions of that time, conditions that have been validated by the findings of archeologists. But just who was the poet who laid down these cornerstones of western literature? Well, tradition ascribes them to a man named Homer, but we know virtually nothing about this Homer. In fact, some say that such a poet never existed at all, that neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was written by a single poet, but rather each poem is composed of the writings of several people. This anyway is the view of a school of literary critics in the 18th century known as the Analysts. The Analysts points to internal evidence such as variations in the literary devices used in the poem to argue that each work was in fact a collection of several poems by several Greek authors. Opposing the analysts were a second group of scholars called the Unitarian. They insisted that the Iliad and the Odyssey could have been the work of a single poetic genius. To support their argument, they stress among other things the consistency of the character portrayed in the poetry. This wouldn’t have been possible, they said, if they were written by many different poets. Now how we look at the Homeric question today has been greatly influenced by someone named Milman Parry, an American scholar who first presented his ideas about Homer in the 1930s. So let’s take a look at Parry’s research and how it affects what modern day scholars think about Homer.