Who Is America’s Homer? | Plough

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Who Is America’s Homer?

Symposium<br>Who Is America’s Homer?

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? We asked a posse of authors and poets to send us their votes.

Joseph M. Keegin<br>Dana Gioia<br>Zena Hitz<br>Emily Wilson<br>A. E. Stallings<br>Zito Madu<br>Jane Clark Scharl<br>A. M. Juster<br>Ross Barkan<br>Christian Wiman

June 16, 2026

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Busts of the Seven Major Heroes of the Iliad, etching and engraving, ca. 1796. [.smalltext]Image © The Trustees of the British Museum. Used by permission.[.smalltext]

Walt Whitman<br>Joseph M. Keegin<br>[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Homer and Hesiod,[.small-caps] Hegel notes, “gave to the Greek gods their names and their form,” but only the former concerned himself too with heroes. Both of Homer’s great poetic epics open with divine invocations directed at human objects: “Sing the rage of Achilles, goddess,” Homer demands at the outset of the Iliad; “Tell me of the man, Muse,” begins the Odyssey. Several centuries later, Virgil starts his self-consciously Homeric fabrication of the founding of Rome by pulling poetry down from the heavens: “I sing” – no longer the gods – “of arms and the man.” Nearly two millennia later, a poor, barely-schooled Quaker’s son writing from “this puzzle, the New World,” the “athletic Democracy” unfolding an ocean away from all known civilization, made himself both singer and song: “One’s-self I sing.”[.article__paragraph--cap]

Thus Walt Whitman, too, named for the Americans their hero and their god. We are, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, natural Cartesians: “In most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.” I think, therefore I am American. We are a nation of isolatoes, in Melville’s phrasing; an entire country corrupted by Socratic skepticism and folded inward by Luther’s doctrine of the heart. In earlier times, this made America a Petri dish of Protestantisms – more recently, it has made us the world’s greatest exporter of breaking news (as Hegel observed, modern man’s lauds) and all varieties of moralism, egoist occultism, and psychotherapy.<br>Whitman presages this all.<br>What do you suppose creation is?<br>What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and<br>own no superior?<br>What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways,<br>but that man or woman is as good as God?<br>And that there is no God any more divine than<br>Yourself?<br>And that that is what the oldest and newest myths<br>finally mean?<br>And that you or any one must approach creations<br>through such laws?<br>For this, he is our Homer.<br>Robert Frost<br>Dana Gioia<br>[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In my years of public life,[.small-caps] I did hundreds of interviews. No matter what the topic – arts funding, education, reading trends, government policy – the reporter would usually ask me one of two questions, “Who is your favorite poet?” “Who is the greatest American poet?” At first, I responded by declaring the impossibility of answering either question. How tiresome I was, responding to a simple question by quibbling about its premise! It gradually occurred to me that the reporters were just being friendly. They didn’t know much about poetry; they were trying to open a personal conversation about the art. I relaxed and gave them answers.[.article__paragraph--cap]

My first answer always disappointed them. Favorite poet?...