Human language, is, by definition, creative. Anyone, even a child, can easily come up with a sentence that has never been uttered before, and we get the impression that this may be true for most of what we say in our everyday lives.Footnote ¹ When it comes to anything longer than a sentence or a phrase, creating new language from scratch strikes us as easier and more natural than reproducing a pre-existing text exactly: anybody can speak for several hours without previous planning, while exactly remembering and reproducing a text of similar length would require significantly more effort. Without any special training, our capacity to create language seems to easily outstrip our capacity to remember it.Footnote ²

When it comes to poetry and literature, we regard creativity as even more essential. While of course we recognize that originality can be hard to achieve (as Bacchylides reminds us), we have come to understand creativity as the poet’s main task and defining feature (as Horace, and the Hellenistic tradition he inherits, reminds us as well). It is on this basis that poets are judged and praised. And we would not call somebody a poet for memorizing and reciting somebody else’s words: reproduction, in other words, is seen as a means of last resort – or as the purview of the lesser artist.

Within this frame of thinking, HomerFootnote ³ presents us with a paradox. As we comb through the poems, as Milman Parry and Albert Lord (and many before and after them) did, we find layer upon layer of tradition and automation. Many of Homer’s expressions are, in a sense, not original creations: they are traditional formulas, passed down for what could be generations; and neither are his stories: they are traditional themes, stretching back hundreds of years. At close inspection, a complex machinery emerges, with precise laws regulating the placement of words in the line or motifs in an episode, and the very choice of vocabulary and dialectal inflections. How do we reconcile all of this mechanicity with Homer’s standing as the first great poet in the Western tradition?

There are two ways of reacting to this discovery, each reflecting a different conception of how human creativity works. The first is to investigate how Homer could have exercised his creativity despite the mechanicity involved. Following this line of inquiry, we study the machinery in order to filter out its effects, so that we can focus on what made Homer unique and original. True, the machinery is there, but Homer transcended the machinery, exploiting it to create something new – and this, the reasoning goes, is why Homer’s works survived, while others did not. Much research in this vein has been produced since Parry’s demonstration of the traditionality of Homer’s technique, in the attempt to salvage Homer from the lower ranks of oral-traditional poets and to vindicate his poetic greatness.Footnote ⁴

The second route is to investigate the machinery itself, in order to understand it not as an obstacle to the poet’s work, but as what enabled Homer’s creativity and greatness. Perhaps Homer did not achieve greatness despite the machinery, but because of it. Perhaps he did not transcend the machinery: he simply used it, masterfully, to achieve precisely what it was designed to do – to create great poetry. Could it be, in other words, that we have misjudged the machinery and its effects?

For one thing, machineries of this kind are more common than we sometimes recognize. Oral-traditional poetry is a near-universal phenomenon,Footnote ⁵ and while many different kinds of oral traditions exist, and each tradition’s methods are unique, the hypothesis that this book pursues is that these traditions are adaptive. They develop systems that complement and boost the poet’s cognitive skills and help poets achieve their goals, and do not detract from them. And they do so in ways that are subtler and smarter than we may have realized so far, and which may illuminate some hidden features of human creativity and cognition.

My overall goal in this book is to pursue this second route, specifically by taking three defining features of Homer’s poetry (formularity, meter, and Kunstsprache) and reassessing them as aids, not obstacles, to the poet’s creativity. In doing so, we shall be assisted by several contemporary disciplines (particularly linguistics and the cognitive sciences), and we shall explore many everyday, contemporary parallels for the aforementioned features, in order to gain a more concrete understanding of how Homer’s traditional machinery contributes to his poetry. What is at stake, ultimately, is our understanding of creativity, artistry, and the conditions that enable poetic greatness.

Even though I aim to contribute to many ongoing debates on the topic of Homer’s language and poetic technique, I wrote this book with the beginner in mind, hoping that even a non-specialist could pick it up and find useful introductions to the main formal features of Homer’s poetry, along with new ways to understand them. I assume familiarity with the Greek alphabet (and ideally some basic knowledge of Greek language and literature), but beyond that, I try to provide explanations, examples, and translations for all matters under discussion. A glossary at the end of the book provides short definitions for technical linguistic terms, and copious footnotes throughout serve the same purpose.