Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's Cantos and Derek Walcott's Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics (review)

Line Henriksen's book is a cogent and meticulous comparison of two treatments of the epic genre that reflect vastly divided historical and ideological vantage points. Pound's Cantos express a culturally supremacist intent, exhibiting what Walcott has himself diagnosed in "The Muse of History" as a dangerous tendency to prophesy: "[T]he polemic poet, like the politician, will wish to produce epic work, to summon the grandeur of the past, not as myth but as history, and to prophesy in the way that fascist architecture can be viewed as prophesy" (43). The conceptual and linguistic limit toward which Pound's poetic trajectory veers is one that Walcott's work programmatically avoids. Omeros concerns itself with the culturally and economically marginalized peoples of St. Lucia, seeking not to aestheticize and reconfigure history but rather to recognize the uselessness of trying to redeem or venerate the past. The task that faces Henriksen is, then, that of illuminating an intriguingly complex set of interconnections between two texts that respond differently to the ideologically suspect ambition conjured by epic voice.

The core of Henriksen's book is a subtle and persuasive analysis of self-reflexivity in the two poems. Her use of rhetorical terminology and theoretical constructs feel restrictive at times, addressing the poems as complex mechanisms rather than representations of emotional response. The approach is, however, unusually incisive and the treatment of copula and metonymy yields interesting conclusions about the nature of poetic language and self-presentation. The reading of the Cantos leads to accurate observations about Omeros: "[T]he point where the poem denies its own affiliation with the epic genre and its complicity in the game of power inevitably binds it inextricably to both" (260). Here, Henriksen identifies a deeply embedded difficulty with which Walcott grapples and correctly acknowledges the centrality of conflict in the poem. It is Walcott's conscious handling of psychic and political discord through complex and mature strategies of self-reflexivity that marks out his work. Henriksen is the first critic to begin to illuminate that procedure.

There remains a great deal to be said about Walcott's use of self-reflexive gesture. The repeated abrogation of authorial dignity and the insistence on the limits of poetic capacity in Omeros cut across the ambition implied by the poem's elevated tone. Henriksen does not comment on the way the text is opened out onto the lives of the inhabitants of St. Lucia through a diminution of authority. As a consequence, the comparison with Pound finally slides into an equation. Sharp distinction between Pound's idiomatic closure and Walcott's openness would be more accurate. Henriksen's study is, however, important and original. Rhetorical and genetic analyses of Pound's work abound, but she provides a sprightly account of how the Cantos frequently encode the frailty of Pound's authoritative prophetic posture. She succeeds, moreover, in locating Omeros in an appropriate modernist literary terrain. Her approach produces attentive and insightful readings of both texts.