Those who continue to find in Homer the virtues possessed by the great poets of later days, however, are more seriously challenged by the view, now generally held, that the author (or authors) of our poem belonged to a long tradition of oral poetry. From an oral poet composing at speed the refinements of pen-and-paper composition cannot be expected. A brilliant Scottish scholar Douglas Young proposed a different scenario, coming up with an unlettered eighteenth-century Gaelic bard called Duncan Macintyre capable of composing orally poems of up to five hundred lines as carefully considered as one could wish. Earning his keep as a game warden, Macintyre roamed the mountainous borders of Argyll and Perthshire meditating his poetry at leisure. Possessing a trained memory he was able to hold in his head what he had composed, going over and reshaping his verses until he had them the way he wanted. Nothing prevents us from supposing that Homer worked in the same way as the wandering Gael.
THE POEM OF ODYSSEUS
D. S. CARNE-ROSS
The above was an afterword/essay from:
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation