The Last of Homer's Children : Goethe Singing Epic

While Goethe loved Homeric epic, at the same time, the figure of Homer himself was a source of deep literary anxiety for him. Goethe could translate epic, even masterfully, but he shrunk back from attempting to compose a serious full-length epic of his own. “Who could vie with the great nonpareil?” he wrote. Reading Wolf’s Prolegomena was a significant turning point for Goethe. So greatly had he revered his Homer, that at first, he angrily rejected the idea of an Iliad and Odyssey composed by a succession of illiterate rhapsodes. Gradually, however, with the help of scholarly Weimar friends, he allowed himself to be convinced.Once freed from the idea of a single, monolithic Homer, Goethe experienced a joyous creative rebirth. Why should he not be a rhapsode himself, if only the last of Homer’s children? The result was an idyll: Herman und Dorothea, which he adorned with nostalgic love, a hero and heroine on a truly Homeric scale, and a fruitful and thoroughly German landscape. With Hermann und Dorothea, Goethe honored not only Homer, but also his own people and times, celebrating what rhapsodes have always sung: the shadow of war and the love of home.