Who was America's Homer?

Surely it was Hollywood...

No doubt you have seen this parlor game at Plough. It got some attention because Emily Wilson chose Tracy Chapman. Over at Washington Review of Books, Steve Larkin was a funny old grump about the whole thing. Of course, one cannot disagree with him that “Homer is the Homer of the Americans.” But I cannot see that “Framing the question in this way is engaging in almost every American intellectual vice at once”, although he is amusing:

A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again”—immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “what is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.

Of the answers given, Frost, Whitman, and Melville were the ones that seemed closest to answering the case to me, though perhaps “nobody yet” is the true answer. I was surprised not to see Alexis de Tocqueville on the list. Why do we assume America’s Homer would be a poet? I was reminded of Flaubert saying, before he wrote Madame Bovary, that there was, as yet, no Iliad of the novel, and of Carlyle reading the Iliad as part of his preparation to write his French Revolution.

I suggest Hollywood. I would certainly put the great directors ahead of Tracy Chapman on a list of people who “capture the American spirit, the American story, the American identity.” Surely John Ford and John Wayne are one obvious answer? Maybe Gone with the Wind. Frank Capra seems too uneven, but Billy Wilder might not be. What about Chaplin? Or Coppola? I don’t think Hitchcock has the necessary scale, somehow. Perhaps just “Hollywood’s Golden Age” as a whole is the best answer?