How a Bold Young American Changed the Way Scholars Think About Homer
Iliad and the Odyssey have been commonly regarded from antiquity to the present as the most exemplary, the truest and the most inspired secular poems in the western heritage. To account for their received excellence, each age has been inclined to interpret them as doing better what it conceived its [own] poets to be doing or aiming at. That is, they tended to be seen like the poems of one’s own age, whatever it was, only better. But no, said Parry, Homer was different, and not just from the literature of our own time, or from Victorian literature, or from that of the Middle Ages, but even ...
Source: lithub.com