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The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American
Poetry
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Radway, John North. 2016. The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Doctoral
dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
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The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
A dissertation presented
by
John North Radway
to
The Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
English
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 2015
© 2015 Î John North Radway
All rights reserved.
Dissertation Advisor: Professor Elisa New John North Radway

The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Abstract

This dissertation explores the afterlife of the Western epic tradition in the poetry of the
United States of America after World War Two and in the wake of high modernism. The ancient,
Classical conception of epic, as formulated by Aristotle, involves a crucial, integral opposition
between ethos, or character, and mythos, or the defining features, narratives, and histories of the
world through which ethos moves. The classical epic and its direct line of succession, from
Homer to Virgil to Dante to Milton and even to Joel Barlow, uses the opposition between ethos
and mythos to create literary tension and drive. In the first half of the twentieth century,
however, Ezra Pound upended this tradition dynamic by attempting to create a new form of epic
in which mythos, not ethos, was the principal agonist, and in which large-scale aspects of the
political, literary, and economic world struggled for survival on their own terms, thus divorcing
epic from its traditional reliance on ethos. Chapter One explores this dubious revolution in terms
qh"RqwpfÓu"nctigt"rtqlgev"qh"dtgcmkpi"cyc{"htqo"jku"pkpgvggpvj"egpvwt{"hqtdgctu0"Vjg"tgockpkpi"
chapters comprise three case studies of the divergent ways in which later twentieth century poets
sought to salvage something of the traditional epic dynamic from the ruin wracked by Pound and
jku"ceqn{vgu0"Ejcrvgt"Vyq"gzrnqtgu"Lqjp"Dgtt{ocpÓu"77 Dream Songs, an epic-like poem that
oqfgnu"kvugnh"uwdvn{"qp"FcpvgÓu"Commedia while placing a profound and deliberate emphasis on
ethos even cv"vjg"gzrgpug"qh"o{vjqu0"Ejcrvgt"Vjtgg"gzrnqtgu"Tqdgtv"NqygnnÓu"ectggt-long effort
to expose the terrifyingly inexorable nature of mythos, constructing an inconceivably enormous
iii
presence against whom character and divinity alike struggle in vain. Finally, Chapter Four
gzcokpgu"Cftkgppg"TkejÓu"gctn{"cpf"okffng"{gctu"cu"cp"cvvgorv"vq"qwvnkpg"cpf"gpcev"c"rqnkvkecnn{"
and socially efficacious means by which ethos might finally overcome mythos and liberate itself
not only from the recursive historical traps of Pound, modernism, fascism, and patriarchy, but
also from the literary history and tradition that lured humanity into believing that those traps ever
gzkuvgf0"Dgtt{ocpÓu"kpvgtxgpvkqp"kp"vjg"grke"vtcfkvkqp"ku"jgcxkn{"nkvgtct{"cpf"qxgtvn{"rgtuqpcn="
NqygnnÓu"ku e{pkecn."crqecn{rvke."cpf"fguetkrvkxgn{"rqnkvkecn="cpf"TkejÓu"ku revolutionary and
messianic. Together, these three poets represent a meaningful sampling of the afterlife of the epic
tradition in late twentieth-century America.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................vi
Abbreviations.................................................................................................................................vii
Introduction: The Fate of Epic.........................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: How Epic Lost Its Ethos: Pound, Browning, and the Columbiad................................10
Chapter 2: Dgtt{ocpÓu"Fcpvg."FcpvgÓu"Xktikn."cpf"vjg"Cuegpukqp"qh"Gvjqu..................................41
Chapter 3: Robert Lowell, Mythos, and the Inexorable IS..........................................................105
Chapter 4: Cftkgppg"TkejÓu"Rquv-Epic Vision.............................................................................180
Bibliography................................................................................................................................213

v
Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the brilliant support of most
people I know. If I were to thank them all, this section would be longer than the following four
chapters. So then, with all due apologies for every reluctant omission, accidental or otherwise,
here are a few of the humans (and one non-human) to whom I owe more gratitude than I can
properly express here or possibly ever: to my advisor and mentor Elisa New, whose brilliance,
honest guidance, unfailing generosity, and extreme kindness helped me through these pages as
well as through several years of my life; to my advisor Stephen Burt, whose surgical insights into
poetry continue to inspire me; to my advisor Andrew Warren, who never let me forget the
Romantics and whose book recommendations always outpaced my ability to read them; to the
Harvard English Department at large, professors and administrators alike, whom I have been
honored to consider colleagues and friends for a quarter of a lifetime; to my infamous graduate
cohort, whose intelligence and quirks made graduate school a far more colorful place than it
might otherwise have been; to the hard-working and highly skilled staff of Harvard University,
its maintenance workers, security guards, custodians and librarians, many of whom I have never
even met but without whose constant labor the academic apparatus as we know it would cease to
exist; to friends too numerous to name, for reminding me about the existence of the outside
world; to my family, who learned exactly which questions never to ask a dissertation writer more
often than weekly; and to Oslo for chewing on my computer screen almost constantly.

vi
Abbreviations
Hqt"vjg"tgcfgtÓu"eqpxgpkgpeg."K"jcxg"ocfg"wug"qh"cddtgxkcvgf"ekvcvkqpu"in the text for
poems quoted from primary sources by the main authors discussed in this dissertation (Ezra
Pound, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich). I hope that these citations prove
unambiguous and prevent more confusion than they cause; however, I include a full list here.
Ezra Pound:

3 Cantos ÐVjtgg"Ecpvqu0Ñ"Poetry 10:3 (1917), 113-121.
Personae Personae of Ezra Pound. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926.
Cantos The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970.

John Berryman:

CP Collected Poems 1937 Î 1971. New York: Faber, Straus & Giroux, 1991.
HMB Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. New York: Faber, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
DS## The Dream Songs. New York: Faber, Straus & Giroux, 2007.
N.B.: To minimize confusion, I have included the number-vkvngu"qh"Dgtt{ocpÓu"
individual dreams songs in lieu of page numbers.

Dante Alighieri:

Inf. Inferno. Trans. Charles Singleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Pur. Purgatorio. Trans. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Par. Paradiso. Trans. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Robert Lowell:

LWC Nqtf"Ygct{Óu"Ecuvng
LS Life Studies
N.B.: The above are collected in Collected Poems. New York: Faber, Straus &
Giroux, 2003. Page numbers refer to this collected edition.
NB678 Notebook 1967 Î 68. New York: Faber, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Adrienne Rich:

CW A Change of World
L Leaflets
N.B.: Page numbers from these two volumes refer to the following edition:
CEP Collected Earlier Poems. New York: Norton, 1993.
DW Diving into the Wreck, excerpted from The Fact of a Doorframe. New York:
Norton, 1984.
vii
Introduction: The Fate of Epic

The study you are about to read is a ghost story.
It is not a critical survey of the epic literature of the twentieth century. I am not wholly
convinced that such a thing even exists, though the label is frequently applied, rightly or
wrongly, to everything from the book-length poem to the encyclopedic novel. This practice is not
without its uses; any set of tezvu"vq"yjkej"c"etkvke"okijv"tgcuqpcdn{"crrn{"vjg"ncdgn"ÐgrkeÑ"ku"
worthy of study in its own right, and, as always, the act of classification itself can be as critically
productive as subsequent observations about the texts, their quirks, and their affinities.
This dissertation is also not a study in the rich and complicated influence of classical
Greek and Latin literature on twentieth-century authors. The reception history of classical texts,
especially in the heavily allusive works of the high modernism of the early twentieth century, is a
fascinating and possibly inexhaustible subject on which much rich criticism has focused while
leaving plenty still to be said. The following chapters say next to none of it, though, as we shall
ugg."Dgtt{ocpÓu"tgkocikpkpi"qh"FcpvgÓu"yqtnfxkgy"ecppqv"dg"wpfgtuvqqf"ykvjqwv"c"nqqm"cv"
GnkqvÓu"crrtqrtkcvkqp"qh"egtvckp"kocigu"htqo"vjg"Divine Comedy, just as post-yct"rqgvuÓ"igpgtcn"
turn toward the reinvigoration of character and the potency of short forms cannot be understood
wivjqwv"c"nqqm"cv"RqwpfÓu"fgvgtokpcvkqp"vq"qwv-Virgil Virgil through a poetics that sought to
found a new civilization of the written word rather than to recount or retell the founding of an
actual civilization.
Vjg"ÐgrkeÑ"ykvj"yjkej"K"co"eqpegtpgf"ku"pqv"c"direct continuation of any of these
traditions. Rather, it is the afterlife of a tradition Î again, if you will, a ghost. A critic examining
any of the genres mentioned above may argue, perhaps rightly, that epic is living still.
1
Paradoxically, this does nqv"rtqxg"vjcv"kv"pgxgt"fkgf0"RqwpfÓu"uwoocvkqp"qh"vjg"grke"vtcfkvkqp"kp"
the Cantos was also a profoundly destructive act
What, then, is the fate of epic in the twentieth century? Now that we are securely (though
perhaps not safely) into the twenty-first, we can begin to ask ourselves this question in earnest.
The past fifty years of scholarship have produced many studies of great merit and significance on
questions surrounding this one, such as the nature and function of the long poem during and after
modernism, especially as an instrument of literary nation-building both in America and within
the disparate community of international modernism; the legacy of classical Greek and Roman
literature on modern poets, especially Pound and Eliot; and the twentieth-cgpvwt{"ÐgrkeÑ"pqxgn."
from Buddenbrooks and Ulysses onward through Pynchon to David Foster Wallace. None of
these topics is the one that this dissertation addresses. The first is relevant to my first chapter as a
necessary and, I hope, an interesting stepping stone toward the latter three. The second is
important insofar as several of the texts we will examine rely on conventional allusion alongside
the structural gestures that link them to the tradition of epic. The third, while fascinating in its
own right."wugu"ÐgrkeÑ"kp"vjg"ugpug"qh"Ðc"nkvgtct{"yqtm"qh"grke"rtqrqtvkqpuÑ="kv"jcu"pq"tgngxcpeg"
here, though the insights that it lends to studies of the modern and postmodern novel are
numerous and worthwhile.
This dissertation, then, is built on the following premises:
1) That the Classical epics of Homer and Virgil share an essential structural gesture
whereby ethos, or character, plays out its action against or within a field of mythos, the agentive
yqtnfxkgy"qh"vjg"vgzv0"*Vjg"vgtou"ctg"CtkuvqvngÓu="K"jcxg"dqrrowed them not only for their
satisfying consonance but also to avoid the critical baggage of terms like character, figure,
persona, setting, milieu, or Weltanschauung. Moreover, none of these rejected terms captures
2