Homeric studies from 1795 for the next 140 years or more: the dispute between so-called 'analysts' and
'Unitarians'. In 1795 F.A. Wolf published, with considerable misgivings, the first serious case for holding
that the Iliad and Odyssey as we have them are compilations put together from the works of many poets.
Once the notion was established, scholars devoted themselves to analysing the poems into their
constituent contributors, and to isolating the 'real' Homer among them. However much aesthetic intuition
might feel the poems to be unities, the experts insisted that reason and science showed them on analysis to
be many poems more or less incompetently combined. My own view is that, subject to some relatively
minor reservations, the poems are in a better form as they are than they can have been at any earlier stage
of development. Whoever put them in their present form was, that is to say, so much the best of the poets
who contributed to them that he is The Poet.
In any case the great bulk of the arguments which the analysts brought to bear have been invalidated by
the recognition in the last fifty years of the relation of Homer to his tradition, to the poets before him. We
have come to see that there are ways in which many poets may have contributed to the Iliad and Odyssey
other than by the editorial combination of separate and separable parts. Much analytic -work was based on
the unravelling of elements, often inconsistent with each other, which were claimed to come from
different periods of history; these included linguistic as well as material and cultural elements. Most
analysts also took verbal repetitions as evidence for their theories: only one occurrence was the 'original',
and all others were later and derivative additions. All of this collapses once it is seen that the poetic
tradition which Homer inherited would by its very nature have incorporated elements from different
periods and even different cultures, regardless of technical consistency; and that it would have positively
depended on verbal repetition. While this discovery did not come out of nowhere, the credit for its
synthesis goes to the Californian Milman Parry (who died at the age of thirty-three in 1936).
Every work of art comes out of a unique interaction between tradition and the individual talent. But
Homer's debt to his tradition is different, in both quality and quantity, from any kind familiar in the rest of
European literary history. The key to this difference is that Homer learned to compose poetry aurally, by
listening to more experienced bards. Whether he could himself write or whether he composed orally
remains controversial. But the case-as near to 'proof as can be expected-has been made that he is the
beneficiary of a tradition passed orally from generation to generation.