Who Is America's Homer?

>All these epics...have something in common: they were all written after the collapse, or apparent collapse, of the civilization they represent. A people doesn’t think to write an epic in its heyday. Rather, an epic – a true epic – comes only after a people has gone through some convulsive change, some transformation or defeat or desolation so total that they no longer know who they are, and they have to write an epic in order to recognize themselves again.

Dunno if this is true or not but it's certainly thought-provoking!

But What If We're Wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/But_What_If_We%27re_Wrong%3F

The premise of the book is that most of what we believe is likely to be wrong, but to avoid delusions in our perceptions, Klosterman advises us to "think about the present as if it were the distant past."

Klosterman examines such phenomena as the history of scientific theories, our perception of historical literary geniuses and our interests in entertainment and professional sports, as background examples to challenge the reader's confidence in their contemporary perceptions, and to try to detect how those perceptions might be mistaken. In a series of what have been called thought experiments, various topics (literary greats, multiverses, time, dreams, democracy, television shows, sports) are analyzed under "Klosterman's Razor": the concept that "the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.

> 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? Plough Quarterly asked for contributions from Joseph M. Keegin, Dana Gioia, Zena Hitz, Emily Wilson, A. E. Stallings, Zito Madu, Jane Clark Scharl, A. M. Juster, Ross Barkan, and Christian Wiman.

Our age has abandoned metered verse for prose. This affects the epic context greatly.

Of gods, Man, and beasts; of savage wrought and ascendant reach; tell us your tales of goddess of glories; speak your prose of divine aspects’ stories.

Let us hope in the age of slop there is still best works of Man yet to come.

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