Milman Parry
Milman Parry (1902 -December 31935) was a scholar of epic poetry.
He studied at the University of California at Berkeley (B.A. and M.A.) and at the Sorbonne (Ph.D.). A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies. In his dissertations, which were published in French in the 1920s, he demonstrated that the Homeric style is characterized by the extensive use of fixed expressions, or 'formulas', adapted for expressing a given idea under the same metrical conditions.
In his American publications of the 1930s Parry introduced the hypothesis that this peculiarity of Homer's style is to be explained by its being the characteristic style of oral composition (the so-called Oral Formulaic Hypothesis). The dissemination of the idea of Homer as an oral poet was continued by his student Albert Lord, most notably in The Singer of Tales (1960).
Between 1933 and 1935 Parry, at the time Associate Professor at Harvard University, made two trips to Yugoslavia, where he studied and recorded oral traditional poetry of the South Slavs.
Parry's collected papers were published posthumously: The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers on Milman Parry, edited by Adam Parry, his son (Oxford University Press, 1971). The Milman Parry collection of records and transcriptions of Southslavic heroic poetry is now in the Widener Library of Harvard University.
He died in a gun accident.[citation needed]
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