SOURCE: Shullenberger, William A. “An Iliad for Our Time: Walcott's Caribbean Epic.” Humanities 22, no. 6 (November-December 2001): 47-49.

In the following essay, Shullenberger compares Walcott's epic poem Omeros to Homer's Iliad.

Although we tend to assign the epic to the literary past as a bygone genre, Derek Walcott's Omeros, published in 1990, asserts the ongoing power of the epic to claim our attention and shape our understanding. The epic is a monumental literary form—an index to the depth and richness of a culture and the ultimate test of a writer's creative power. Homer's Iliad stands at the beginning of the epic tradition in western culture, and Walcott's Omeros is that tradition's most recent expression.

The epic is the collective memory of a people, offering poetic memory as a way to transcend the afflictions and losses of history. Homer, for instance, marks the differences and continuities between Greeks and Trojans, and...