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20th Century Epics And Carrying The Torch Of Tradition
3 September 2008, the poet @ 7:28 pm

I realize this is a rather sketchy history, but today I’m discussing the literate age of poetics, mostly the 20th century. I’m not going into great detail on purpose. Nevertheless, it should be helpful to see how the epic has changed over time. When we think of the great epics there are certain stories that come to most people’s minds:

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Beowulf
• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
• Virgil’s The Aeneid
• Dante’s Inferno
• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
• Milton’s Paradise Lost

After Milton, most people outside of academia couldn’t name many epics. The Eastern epic aside, epic tradition has mostly followed one strain from Homer through the Romantics. It isn’t until we get into the 20th century, with Imagism and Realism taking poetry into new directions, with Ezra Pound whacking us all on the head with his Cantos, Louis Zukovsky giving birth to Ron Silliman through “A”, and William Carlos Williams outdoing them both with Paterson. There have been other epics since, but these are the most significant in terms of the birth of 20th century poetics. And you can add Eliot’s The Waste Land, a short epic by comparison, in there as well.

In each period throughout the literate age there is a dominant recognizable structure among the works that have been canonized. Dante’s terza rima, Milton’s blank verse, and Lord Byron’s ottava rima are examples. These forms represent the popular forms of the time. Even when the poets were innovative they were innovative within certain popularly understood constraints. For instance, it was largely understood that poetry should rhyme and Western poets wouldn’t have thought to write an epic without the use of some kind of rhyme scheme - until Milton.

Another element to the epic is that the storyline typically involves some cultural significance. The hero must be someone with whom the audience can relate. Whether Gilgamesh or Charles Olson’s Maximus, who was possibly a piece of Olson himself, the hero is a cultural icon. The epic is a national story.

The perfect example of a cultural epic is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. Published in 1855, the poem captured the imaginations of its audience much the same way that films like Independence Day do today. In almost every case, the epic poem is written idiomatically for the current culture.

20th Century Epics: A Pound Of Cure

Ezra Pound changed the course of poetry, probably forever. One of the most important ways in which he did is to toss out the traditional rhyme scheme and to invent new rhythms. Ezra Pound loathed the rhymes of the past and he set out to turn poetic structure on its ear, which he did, with the help of his friends Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. Of the four, Williams and Eliot are the best. Pound’s ideas were not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but his disciples have taken them and turned them into rain water for buckets of mud.

Pound’s Cantos, six decades in the making and still unfinished, represent the Modernist aesthetic very well. He was much more concerned with precise language, as he should have been, than he was in, as he called it, the “sequence of a metronome.” (That could have been a direct ridicule of Longfellow.)

Iambic pentameter was out, irregular patterns were in. So began the disintegration of poetics (not that I’m defending iambic pentameter). Ironically, Pound’s ego had this to say about his legacy:

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

He was almost right. He did survive (and will). But did the art of letters come to an end? Well, sort of. The end as it was known at the dawn of the Modern era has certainly come to an end. Poetic forms have been altered permanently, for better or worse.

Pound’s Legacy: The Late 20th Century

While the 20th century has seen its windows of traditional poetic structures, the bulk of it has simply been lesser poets trying to reach Pound’s pinnacle of expression. But instead of heeding his instruction …

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

… many 20th century writers have drifted off into garrulity or gratuitous obscuration. It’s unclear when you read much of it whether or not these are intentional or just a result of a lack of discipline. In general, I’d say it’s a lot of both, but the degree of either depends on the individual poet and the school or movement he or she represents.

A large portion of writing in the 20th century has been a denial of Pound’s insistence that writers should study criticism. Most don’t, and it shows in their work. Pound’s words again:

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

This is a rather cutting statement because the 20th century has seen the proliferation of more schools of thought in poetics than any other century. While the splintering has needled down to the smallest denominations, fewer people in the general public are reading poetry. The reasons for this are disputed and debated, but the truth of it widely recognized.

Rhyme and meter, with some exceptions, were not all that important in 20th century poetics. The forms and structures changed all around. The epic hero was not a solitary figure any more as in the case of Gilgamesh and Hercules. The line units have changed, the rhythms have changed, the nature of the characters have changed, and virtually every aspect of the story itself has transformed into a different mode. That’s significant, but it isn’t necessarily bad (though, I’ll argue, it isn’t all good either).

Rather than send a hero on some epic quest for gold and glory, modern epics have a grander dream. Pound sought to tell the universal story. Charles Olson, in The Maximus Poems, sought to revise U.S. history. Williams, too, sought to retell American history through Paterson, but in a less overtly ideological way. These epics of place have positioned themselves against the previous strain of the heroic epic and the potential to explore that strain of epic storytelling has yet to be tapped fully.

Another kind of epic that has emerged in recent years and which The Maximus Poems might be considered a part is the personal epic. Olson used his narrator Maximus to convey a sense of himself in many ways, but a better example of this type of epic is John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.” This long narrative deals with Ashbery’s reflections on a painting by that name so it is partially a personal narrative, but it is also an ekphrastic poem. You could call it a personal-reflective ekphrastic epic and not go wrong.

These long narratives in the late 20th century, when fast food and flash fiction are the norm, may seem out of place. In a way they are. But they are not dead. There are still epics being written as late as the 1990s and early 21st century. New Formalist poet Frederick Turner published his epic poem Genesis in 1988. As late as 1996, Gary Snyder introduced Mountains and Rivers Without End. Earlier this year, journalist Thomas Flynn published his 76-page epic poem Bikeman, which tells of his experience during the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 while riding his bike in Manhattan. So the epic is still alive and well.

Splinters In The Wood: Poetry’s Multiplying Strains

The popular poetic expressions today - Spoken Word, confessional poetry, creative nonfiction, barely read memoirs, a dying postmodernism still gagging on its last breath - all have their roots buried somewhere in the poetry of the past. Whether they owe their allegiance to Pound or Williams, the pre-literates, Walt Whitman, Medieval Renaissance literature, or Homer, there is someone you can point to in the past who was an influence. That’s as it should be. It means there is no broken strain. Poetic expression does not exist in a vacuum.

Today, though, there is no dominant school of poetic thought. There are competing schools of thought, and sometimes schools within schools that compete. With Pound, the one strain of poetic tradition that has existed for most of literary history split in two. The avant-garde went one way and the traditional, or formal, went the other way. You can trace the avant-garde strain from Pound through Williams, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and on up to the Language School. Now there are new avant-garde movements developing with Flarf and hypertext poetry. Visual poetry has exploded online.

The formal strain has run its course primarily through the academy and the National Endowment of the Arts. It has seen a resurgence in its historic roots with the New Formalists, but much of the 20th century formal element prior to this latter day revival was cross-pollinated from the avant-garde strain, especially from the Black Mountain poets onward. Postmodernism itself saw a sort of fusion between the two strains even while other strains developed from the two - a sort of convergence-divergence matrimony. And this is where we stand today at the dawn of the post-literate age.

Poetics has splintered into competing groups, sometimes quite hostile to each other. The original splintering took place with the Modernists. From there you can see a hard break from the past. The Victorians were the last group of poets to be explicitly formal in their structures until New Formalism saw its birth late last century. By then, the great schism was complete. The fissures are permanent and there is no turning back.

Coming next: The future of the epic.

If you missed the first post in this centuries, click here to catch “The Epic Future: 21st Century Narratives And Poetic History”.

Read part 3 of this series now.

5 Comments a “20th Century Epics And Carrying The Torch Of Tradition”

1. Jeannine Hall Gailey — September 3, 2008 @ 8:44 pm
   

   So, I would argue that Paterson, the Cantos, and The Wasteland all represent not epic poetry, but the first of a new generation of long fragmented poems - HD’s Helen In Egypt might be closer to an epic, actually. These long fragments gave birth to the “obfuscation” in poetry today - the writers mean to communicate in so fragmented away that you pretty much have to make up meaning or sense.

   Jeannine Hall Gaileys last blog post..

2. Jim Murdoch — September 4, 2008 @ 4:36 am
   

   The first epic poem I came across, living in Burns country, was ‘Tam o’Shanter’ followed a few years later by the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. I got both of them and never took issue with their length but I’ve never managed that with the modern pieces you mentioned. I love Williams’ work for example and yet I’ve never read more than a few excerpts of Paterson. I did listen to Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ when it was shown on TV – a rare thing for a poet – but its length bored me. It’s partly an attention span thing. The older poems were just stories that rhymed but the modern epic isn’t like that and I tire because I can’t maintain the concentration level they require. Don’t expect me to rush out and buy a copy of Silliman’s The Alphabet any day soon.

   Jim Murdochs last blog post..An interview with Adrian Graham

3. the poet — September 4, 2008 @ 7:20 am
   

   @ Jeannine, good point: Your last statement sums up my point with this post, though the classification of epic in the 20th century is problematic because of the stark change in poetics. A long narrative may not necessarily be an epic. I am being rather loose with the word.

   BTW, someone else recommended that I add Helen of Egypt to the list of 20th century epics. Note, of course, that I wasn’t attempting to be exhaustive, but HD deserves a mention.

   @ Jim, you hit one of my faves. I didn’t mention Coleridge in this at all and probably should have, though I prefer Kubla Khan to The Rime (still good, however).

4. G.M. Palmer — September 4, 2008 @ 7:38 am
   

   Allen,

   I had to do an academic paper as a part of my MFA poetry thesis. It was on the 20th century epic. Email me if you’d like a crack at it.

   M

   G.M. Palmers last blog post..Refutation

5. Billy The Blogging Poet — September 4, 2008 @ 2:59 pm
   

   As a fan and writer of epics I’m enjoying this series greatly. Thanks

   Billy The Blogging Poets last blog post..Poetry’s Lost Soul

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