Epic Finish

Note : This essay was written as a submission for a seminar at the 2022 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, hosted by Norman Finkelstein, on Nathaniel Mackey and contemporary long poems.  (Note : this particular essay was not included in the program.)

1

Chief Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Thus opens Wallace Stevens’ “Bantams in Pine-Woods” : a 10-line take-down of his giant rivals in American poetry – Eliot, Pound – with their abstract blasts, their canonical pronunciamentos.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!  I am the personal.

Your world is you.  I am my world.

Nevertheless, here we also find a faint echo of Walt Whitman (both “kosmos” and “simple separate person”).  And according to Michael Bernstein(1), there is genuine fortitude in the way Pound answered the detachment of Symbolism – and its surrender of poetry’s communal values to prose fiction – with the example of Whitman.  Pound certainly admired the novelists; but he felt poetry manifested something more vital : the passionate affirmations of the creative spirit itself, as opposed to fiction’s clinical analytics.

The Pound vortex resonates with a thematic parallelism, a rhyme of dimensions.  Chronological time, historical development, and the pilgrim’s progress of the epic hero, reinforce each other, suspended amidst a mythical journey.  This pattern amalgamates quest, chronicle, and diary – drawing readers along wide-rambling, spun-out trails : Cantos, Paterson, Maximus Poems.

Yet there is a recurrent critical perception of something unfinished about this epic project.  Joseph Conte, in Unending Design(2), would supplant modernist aspiration toward totality with postmodern serialism – aleatory, improvisational.  This contrast recalls the ancient rivalry between Virgil – epic, imperial – and Ovid, with his “continuous song”,  his Metamorphoses.

Yet these binaries are quite porous.  On the one hand, Whitman tried to rake together his Leaves, reducing it to 52 sections – yet its prospect is an “open road”.  Pound envisioned a method for magisterial totality – but suggested an incapacity to “make it cohere”.  Williams tacked on a late fifth chapter to Paterson, to present some enfolding resolution.  On the other hand, the serialism of “modules” is actually applicable to any structure, closed or open.  Think of the framing trellises in Berryman’s serial Dream Songs : line, stanza, song, part, book.  Moreover, the alleged openness of serialism can be quite linear.  Like music rooted in a key, the droning of an open string, there is repetition in the most aleatory series : the continuity of the poet’s voice, the composer’s hand.  Robin Blaser’s notion, cited by Conte (3), that serial poems are closer to “natural” successions of time and seasonal change, is a mode of naturalism or realism, imposed upon an ideal of postmodern form.

Closure – the sense of fulfillment, of seeds ripening to fruition; the beauty of beginning, middle and end – these processes are not static, but continuously unfolding.  Shakespeare, like Pound, also borrowed shiny bits of (British) history, and fitted them into a dramatic series, each with its emphatic finale – yet foreshadowing the next play.  Old legends become radiant gists, enlivened by the pathos of embodied players.  “But the art itself is nature”, Hamlet notes.  Themes radiate allusively through such “closed” forms, echoing in the mind after the play is done.  

Crane’s Bridge appears, among modernist epics, the odd one out.  The poem’s diurnal framework (modeled on Joyce’s Ulysses?) encapsulates a series of American myths – a quasi-Shakespearean panorama in microcosm.  It also shapes a miniature quest : returning whence it began, to the rail of the bridge-grail, with metaphysical hosannahs at the end.  Unlike its rivals, The Bridge satisfies an aesthetic desire for wholeness, amplitude, finish.  It is compact, with that particular strength of compositional integrity – producing a pleasing after-effect, despite its weaknesses.  It hovers somewhere between the mythical ironies of Ovid and the imperial determinism of Virgil – a plangent equilibrium.

A forgotten masterpiece of literary criticism is Roy Harvey Pearce’s Continuity of American Poetry(4).  Pearce set the long poem firmly at the center of his story.  His schema is based on two conjoined ideas.  First, the essential role of the American poet is a struggle on behalf of creative imagination, against a fundamentally anti-poetic reality.  And second, Whitman made a discovery pivotal to this enterprise : he dared write a completely new kind of epic, which replaced the traditional adventures of a representative, semi-divine paragon, with a new hero for the age of democracy – the poet in person, the creative Self.  The epic task is simply the embattled making of the poem.  

Thus Pearce portrays the situation of American poets as a tension of overlapping resistances.  First, there was the Puritan resistance to medieval Christianity, based on a fervor for Scripture alone.  Then followed an upsurge of antinomian spiritualism, at the edge of Puritanism – a veering to the limits of its own creed (Quakerism is one  example).  Then evolved the fusion of Transcendentalist and antinomian impulses, in the writers of the American Renaissance (Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) – and finally, the fully-formed resistance of American poets, armed with these spiritual weapons, to the ambience of anti-poetry in the wider culture – the transactional, pragmatic, workaday world of Enlightenment America.  In sum, the spirit of Transcendentalist poetry – and even more so, paradoxically, of the Symbolists’ progenitor, Edgar Poe – was a struggle for the imagination against anti-poetic reality.  

So, with Leaves of Grass, epic becomes the heroism of egalitarian vision… until the 20th century, when forces of scientific positivism and industrialized society consigned that vibrant legacy to Whitman’s lesser imitators.  At which point, according to Pearce, Pound and Eliot set a dialectical “counter-current” in motion.  Not the egocentric celebration of the Self, but its renunciation; not the defense of equality but its critique, on behalf of tradition.  Ultimately, not democracy, but monarchy – or Confucian dictatorship.

This powerful reversal sparked another resistance, by Crane, Williams, Moore, Stevens, et al. – a return (characteristically, individually) to antinomian roots.  Stevens, for Pearce, represents the high terminus of this struggle : a quasi-philosophical endeavor to enunciate completely humanist grounds for imaginative freedom – without any need of divine sanction.

Pearce’s model offers what he calls an “inside story” of American poetry.   And this scenario of resistances exudes a faint scent of its own mythical meta-drama.  Here are reverberations of archaic kingship, duels around the sacred oak; shades of the enfeebled Fisher King, expecting the Grail; Stevens’ cock-fighting bantams, each with its own idiom for the emblematic hero.  Berryman, lying in his Minneapolis sickbay, mourning absent friends and old masters… Pound, incarcerated across from the Capitol, kowtowing to towering icons of the past (Dante, Homer).  Finished.  

But then, what is ever finished in American poetry?  The hero?  The self?  Our only king is Martin Luther King.  And perhaps today, in our time, the musing, crooning, abiding Nate Mackey is – to anagrammatize – America’s “native son of the Key, son of the K.”

2

We have offered a neat picture of epic as finished object, as rounded totality.  “Literature is hero-worship”, propounded Pound; his Cantos present a transfer of American egoism into a Dantesque summa of world history : a parade of iconic, “factive men”, culminating in the bloated corpse of Mussolini – the dictator as sacred victim.  And we have framed epic as a reiteration of the rivalry of mythical kings.  But what does that rivalry concern?  Ultimately it was about a woman.  “Who will have the succession?” cries Pound, in Canto 80.  It was about woman as royal consort, generative mother.  It was a succession crisis : who shall continue the line?  Who shall be Queen Bee, Queen Mother?  Robert Graves, of course, with H.D., Robert Duncan, and Ted Hughes, delved into this implicit primal matter.  The neatness of my outline obscures an underlying false consciousness, rooted in male narcissism.  There are other voices, left out of my scheme : Dickinson; H.D.; Joyce; Zukofsky; Neidecker; and more recently, Lisa Robertson; Lissa Wolsak; Rachel Blau DuPlessis.  Each of these offers more feminine versions of cultural heroism.  Finally, perhaps a more fruitful way to approach the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey might be under a Zukofskian, rather than Poundian, aegis.  Power is turned inward, into song; history is raveled and unraveled, like Penelope’s tapestry, or Anansi’s web.  And the duel for success – for succession – stretches into an infinity of suspense : a questioning ambivalence, a teetering see-saw, a ship (loaded with abandoned children, exiles from Atlantis).

Notes

1) Bernstein, Michael André, The Tale of the Tribe : Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic.  Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1980.

2) Conte, Joseph M., Unending Design : the Forms of Postmodern Poetry.  Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.

3) Conte, Joseph M., “Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem”.  Sagetrieb, 11 (Spring-Fall 1992), pp. 35-45.

4) Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Continuity of American Poetry.  Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1961.