LSAT 102, Section 1, RC Passage 2, Homer’s Critics

RC Passage 2 Explanation

Paragraph Summaries

1. For a long time, professional poetry critics avoided analyzing the poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
2. Milman Parry changed our view of oral poetry. This led to years of boring study that drove poetry scholars to study other subjects.
3. Parry’s son restored scholarly interest in Homer’s poetry.

Analysis

This passage is all about the scholars of Homer’s poems. For years, they lost interest in the poems themselves. They focussed on historical and archaeological issues. The next two paragraphs explain why scholars lost and regained interest.

Milman Parry made an incredible discovery about oral poetry and how it led to Homer’s epics.

But the scholars who succeeded Parry got distracted and only focussed on oral storytelling. This led to 35 years of boring scholarship.

Parry’s son Adam reminded the scholars that Homer wrote really good poems. So after 1970, scholars started to focus on the poems themselves.