Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived ; ;

Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form.

Early twentieth-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems.

Independent of the question of single authorship is the near-universal agreement, after the work of Milman Parry, that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets ( aoidoi ).

Albert Bates Lord examined oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and the texts of epics such as the Odyssey and Beowulf.

* The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Online

Milman Parry ( June 20, 1902 – December 3, 1935 ) was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.

Parry's collected papers were published posthumously: The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited by Adam Parry, his son ( Oxford University Press, 1971 ).

The Milman Parry collection of records and transcriptions of South Slavic heroic poetry is now in the Widener Library of Harvard University.

* The Milman Parry Collection at Harvard University

* The On-Line Database of Harvard's Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature ( MPCOL )

de: Milman Parry

es: Milman Parry

fr: Milman Parry

is: Milman Parry

it: Milman Parry

la: Milman Parry

nl: Milman Parry

no: Milman Parry

pt: Milman Parry

sv: Milman Parry

Albert Bates Lord ( September 15, 1912 – July 29, 1991 ) was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who, after the death of Milman Parry, carried on that scholar's research into epic literature.

Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.