CHAPTER 4
Transcendentalism and the “New” Epic Traditions
The work of artists such as West, Cole, and Leutze inhabited an uneasy space between the national and the transnational. American art, for all its wealth of material for landscape painting, relied on methods and styles imported from Europe—and often made in or sent to Europe as well. Similar practices of import and export also defined the literature of the early nineteenth century. As has been shown in previous chapters, the classics had played a central role in colonial and early national experiments with American epic, but the classics themselves began to be transformed in the wake of new American interactions with modern Europe. Caroline Winterer describes a shift in the place of the classics in the American academy and the belletristic world after about 1820, a move she characterizes as one “from words to worlds.”1 While Timothy Dwight’s generation had revered the discipline of recitation drills and the authority of the ancient authors they studied, the generation of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Everett looked to the classics as sources of transcendent truth to be mined through philological inquiry. Responding to the rapid changes in German scholarship after the systematizing of classical philology and of hermeneutics at the end of the eighteenth century (Everett had earned a PhD from the University of Göttingen), many of the new generation of American teachers and critics saw their purpose focused not as much on creating an ordered society through classical education as on finding truth that each individual student could grasp and explore. At the same time that poets like Homer came to stand for timeless genius, however, new scholarship called into question the very existence of a Homer at all. The lessons of history became a tug-of-war between first principles and the mess of historical information that was rapidly accumulating. A new generation of American writers would have to come to terms with epic in the wake of this maelstrom, and the search for American epic’s place in the world became increasingly exciting and uncertain as the nineteenth century continued.
The debate over “the Homeric question” swept through classical scholarship across Europe and the United States, remaining a major controversy in the field throughout the nineteenth century. The touchstone that started this debate was the philologist Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which argued that the composition of Homer’s epics was actually the work of several anonymous bards and editors stretching across centuries. The furor over Wolf’s ideas spread from the universities into Atlantic intellectual culture, as the debate entangled ancient Greek philology, biblical scholarship, and religious skepticism: if Homer was not the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, perhaps God was not the author of the Bible, either. The Homeric question entered American intellectual culture by the 1820s and served as a litmus test for religious and political liberalism.2 Suddenly, the act of reading Homer became not just a matter of genteel education but a dramatization of one’s place amid the ideological tensions of the post-1812 United States.
This shift in thinking about the classics paralleled a startling expansion of the available epic canon in Europe and the United States following the Napoleonic Wars. The wide, rapid dissemination of print associated with the pre-1800 “age of the pamphlet” reached unprecedented volume as machine printing became available in the 1820s, making true mass production possible at the same time that railroads and post roads finally made rapid national distribution a reality for publishers and booksellers. This new age of mass publishing, while it primarily benefited the growth of periodical and popular literature, also made the classics more widely available than ever before. At the same time, new texts from inside and outside the United States entered American literary markets. Beowulf appeared in print, and soon thereafter in a modern English translation, for the first time in the 1820s; the Finnish epic Kalevala appeared just a few years later; and Hindu texts such as the Mahabharata appeared in English and French translations by 1840. Dante’s Divina Commedia had first appeared in English at the turn of the nineteenth century and moved into Anglo-American consciousness after Coleridge lectured on the Tuscan poet twenty years later. And the American answer to James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems came in the 1836 publication of what the Franco-American linguist C. S. Rafinesque claimed was a Lenape epic, the Walam Olum or Red Score (discussed further in chap. 6). Poems such as Byron’s Don Juan and Wordsworth’s The Excursion enjoyed both popular success and critical influence in American literary circles through the mid-1800s. The first professors of modern languages began teaching at colleges such as Harvard and the University of Virginia, reflecting the gradual widening of American academic and commercial interests based on a growing awareness of the importance of international relations in the economy and culture of the nineteenth century. The epic canon in the 1830s was both much larger and more diverse than the already growing pantheon treated in the mid-eighteenth century by Blair and Kames.
At the same time, texts not previously considered epics were reevaluated through a blend of classical poetics and modern attention to a book’s cultural influence. For example, Pilgrim’s Progress had long been seen as literature for the pious and the young owing to its strong didacticism, emotional spectacle, and heavy allegory. However, few books had as much of a cultural impact on nineteenth-century America as Pilgrim’s Progress, and that cultural influence set off a minor culture war within intellectual circles,3 even as critics increasingly found Bunyan’s work to be commensurate with epic—even epic outright. In the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1847, a survey of popular classics offered high, if somewhat bemused, praise of Bunyan: “Modern criticism, indeed, has ventured to assign to [Pilgrim’s Progress] a rank even equal with that of Homer, the sublime epic of Milton, and the mighty genius of the world’s great poet!”4 The final exclamation point suggests surprise at Pilgrim’s elevation along-side works like the Iliad, revealing the critic’s preference that some sort of demarcation could stand between Bunyan’s “low” work and the “mighty genius” of more sophisticated writers. A less squeamish critic in the New York Observer took on more traditional senses of epic in defending Bunyan’s fame: “The Pilgrim’s Progress is in fact an exalted epic even according to the most philosophical definition of that term.” The Observer critic went on to consider “matter,” “form,” and “end” as criteria for Pilgrim’s epic status, even noting that “the law of the epic in its threefold distribution was unconsciously observed by this profound student of the human heart,” ultimately discounting the importance of academic principles of epic in favor of the sheer emotional power of the book’s “profound” author.5 One of the most pointed celebrations of Pilgrim appeared in a notice of a new American edition of the book in 1848 in the Ladies Repository, and Gatherings of the West: “What more can be said, of this great epic poem in prose, that has long since secured an immortality of renown? It will be read as long as the Iliad, or Paradise Lost, or any other work in any language.”6 In the face of Bunyan’s cultural power, distinctions between high and low—or between poetry and prose—had little significance for many of his readers. New philological paradigms and a new array of “epic” texts had joined with common usage to further destabilize what an epic was. This chapter traces the efforts by members of the transcendentalist movement, as well as those they corresponded with and influenced, to gain new understanding of what epic could mean for their time, and for the ever-belated project of American literature.
The New Classicism: Jones Very, Francis Lieber, and Modern Epic Criticism
If Dwight’s and Barlow’s generation had been haunted by the question of whether epic was possible after Milton, the question facing Emerson’s and Longfellow’s generation was whether epic was possible after modernity. This shift from an author-based literary history to a culture-or worldview-based one reflected the increasing interest in universal history among Anglo-American intellectuals, as well as an increased awareness of the intellectual and economic systems that manipulated the work and reception of authors, even those of the rank of Homer and Milton. In his lecture on “The Hero as Poet” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), Thomas Carlyle lamented the presence of conventionality even in Shakespeare’s finest works: “Alas, Shakspeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould. … No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.” No perfect works emerge from authors or artists, says Carlyle, only “Disjecta membra,” disjointed limbs of a complete constitution, evidence of the individual artist’s struggle against the systems that both enable and defeat him.7 Could even Milton produce a great poem under such “conditions?” Did Milton rather defeat modernity through his classical learning and his financial independence from the literary marketplace? The example of Milton as the great critical touchstone for epic extended well into the 1830s, but by then the ways that Milton was read and could be rhetorically deployed had changed drastically since the 1770s.
Perhaps the American essay that best encapsulated current European thought regarding the viability of modern epic in the 1830s United States was Jones Very’s “Influence of Christianity and of the Progress of Civilization on Epic Poetry,” published in 1838 in the Christian Examiner and again the next year as “Epic Poetry” in Emerson’s edition of Very’s Essays and Poems.8 Very had continually reworked his essay from 1835, when he submitted it as his senior dissertation at Bowdoin, through the following two years, in which time he gave a related lecture on “Heroic Character” at Harvard and two respective versions of the “Epic Poetry” essay at the Salem and Concord Lyceums, with further personal feedback from Elizabeth Peabody and Emerson.9 Rejecting the terms of Kames’s and Blair’s earlier discussions of the relative merits of epic machinery, catalogs, and other traditional conventions of epic poetry, Very began his own essay with a bold denial of the very notion of continuing epic poetry as Homer’s age defined it: “The poets of the present day who would raise the epic song cry out, like Archimedes of old, ‘give us a place to stand on and we will move the world.’ This is, as we conceive, the true difficulty” (1). Drawing silently from German writers such as Schiller and the Schlegels, Very argued that modern failures to equal Homer’s poetry are not so much a matter of diminished genius as of the changing culture and psychology of European civilization.
As Very saw the history of epic composition and reception unfold, he found that Homer’s poetry had more influence over his own time than Virgil’s had over the Roman empire; Very traced the source of this inequality to the fact that while Virgil had followed Homer’s model admirably, the “advance, which the human mind had made towards civilization” (2), made Virgil’s anachronisms too obvious to move his readers as Homer had done. The Greeks lived in a world dominated by externals, such that everything about the Iliad was conceived in terms of the physical world. As the rise of philosophy and artistic self-awareness rendered the physical world less important relative to the immortal world of intellect and spirit, what constituted Homer’s “epic interest” would come less from external events than from internal “dramatic” (4) interest. Very moves forward to Tasso and Dante, the former as the last great example of attempts to create an epic on a truly Homeric plan, the latter as the first author to successfully engage the poetic power of the spiritual—and to show how much at odds the spirit of Christianity was with the form of the classical epic. The cataclysmic battle no longer could capture an audience’s complete attention, since the power of the individual wills that brought that battle into being were more infinite, more godlike, than any physical action on the field. For Homer, nothing greater than fame throughout history could be imagined, much less attained; for Dante, Milton, and the poets who followed them, infinity itself became an object of ambition. Only by the representation of a mind in terms as objective as those Homer used in his epics could a poet truly surpass, or even equal, the “epic interest” of the Iliad.
The case of Paradise Lost was particularly demonstrative for Very of the new world that epicists faced in Christian modernity. As with Dante, Milton wisely chose an infinite subject, the spiritual struggles leading up to and implications of the Fall. Very’s Milton works only in biblical and spiritual terms, abandoning the temporality and materiality that bound Dante to his historical Tuscany in populating the spiritual realms with actual Italians. However, by going further into the immortal than Dante, Milton in Paradise Lost “confirms more strongly the conclusion that we drew from Dante’s [poem], that dramatic is supplying the place of epic interest” (25–26). Citing Milton’s original intention to write Paradise Lost as a tragedy (26), as well as the structure of the poem itself, Very finds that the narration of motivations for action, rather than the actions themselves, has blended the epic and the dramatic. This causes serious rhetorical problems for Milton, as Very points out that if Adam’s exercise of free will is what makes him a hero, Satan’s use of free will is even more heroic: “There is seen a conflict of ‘those thoughts that wander through eternity,’ at the sight of which we lose all sense of the material terrors of that fiery hell around him, and compared with which the physical conflict of the archangels is a mockery” (28). If the spiritual side of humanity could be heroic, the purer spirituality of Satanic consciousness would be even more compelling. Epic had moved from sculptural description to cosmological portraiture.
As Perry Miller noted, Very’s reading of Milton’s Satan as a Byronic hero, though common enough among European romantic critics, was new in the United States at the time.10 The implications that Very saw for his reading were even more astonishing: “Adam is not so much the Achilles as the Troy of the poem. … Though he [Milton] has not made the Fall of Man a tragedy in form, as he first designed, he has yet made it tragic in spirit; and the epic form it has taken seems but the drapery of another interest” (29–30). But the impossibility of writing epic in the current age was actually cause for celebration; continuing his metaphorics of human development, Very quipped that “to sigh that we cannot have another Homeric poem, is like weeping for the feeble days of childhood,” and such nostalgia fails to acknowledge “those powers of soul which result from … progress, which enable it, while enjoying the present, to add to that joy by the remembrance of the past, and to grasp at a higher from the anticipations of the future” (31). To paraphrase Stanley Fish, Very argued that there’s no such thing as a modern epic, and it’s a good thing, too.
And yet Very refused to relinquish the aura of the term “epic” to ancient works; in a rapid survey of modern literature, he asked, “What, indeed, are the writings of the great poets of our own times but epics; the descriptions of those internal conflicts, the interest in which has so far superseded those of the outward world” (34). While Very had taken what seemed to be a much more traditional stance toward epopee than, say, Dwight and Barlow, both of whom had denied Homer preeminent status as the model for all epics, Very’s reading of Homer emphasized not so much form as poetic purpose. He posited that Homer’s decision to write an epic poem “originated, doubtless, in that desire, which every great poet must especially feel, of revealing to his age forms of nobler beauty and heroism than dwell in the minds of those around him” (5). Rather than denying Homer’s place as the father of all epic poetry, Very rejected Aristotle’s formulation of the rules for epic, arguing that the original of those rules, the Iliad, should take critical precedence; as a sort of Aristotelian new covenant, Very declared that “we would only say that according to the spirit of those rules every true epic must be formed” (13). And this “spirit,” tied to Homer’s original poetic motives, could infuse texts that were not even formally recognizable as epics: “The Sartor Resartus, Lamartine’s Pilgrimage, Wordsworth’s poem on the growth of an individual mind, all obey the same law,—which is, that as Christianity influences us, we shall lay open to the world what has been long hidden, what has before been done in the secret corners of our own bosoms; the knowledge of which can alone make our intercourse with those about us different from what it is too fast becoming, an intercourse of the eye and the ear and the hand and the tongue” (21). The spirit of Homer, channeled across the centuries from the age of epic interest to that of dramatic interest, could ensure a connection to the greatest of all poets, even as modern poets sought to escape the limitations of classical form. As Very declared at the end of his article, the inability to celebrate the past in epic form was itself something to celebrate, a sure sign of cultural progress: “We rejoice at this inability [to write an epic]; it is the high privilege of our age, the greatest proof of the progress of the soul, and of its approach to that state of being where its thought is action, its word power” (37).
Like his poetry, Very’s criticism was motivated by his own personal pursuit of moral and intellectual authenticity; Edwin Gittleman gives the most comprehensive reading to date of Very’s “Epic Poetry” in Jones Very: The Effective Years, in which he argues that the essay is actually a projection of the essayist’s own personal growth, with the classical and the modern mind-sets separated by what Very himself described as a “change of heart,” an identity crisis he suffered in late 1835.11 However personal Very’s essay was, and however striking it seemed to its early audience (especially Peabody and Emerson), it was by no means unique—at least among European thinkers and their American readers.12 In fact, Very’s essay might be read as a response to the essay on “Epic” in Francis Lieber’s Encyclopaedia Americana (1829–33), which summarized German romantic theories of epic. While Very’s transcendentalist connections and reputation for mental instability marked him as a fringe intellectual with an influence that barely expanded beyond Boston, Lieber enjoyed widespread respect among American cultural elites. Lieber was a legal scholar who emigrated from Germany to the United States after being banned from teaching in Prussia during the Metternich regime as a result of his radical democratic ideals; ironically, however, his thorough scholarship and his enthusiastic nationalism and Unionism made him a favorite among Whigs and elite scholars in his adopted country. Sympathetic New England intellectuals, including Göttingen alumni George Ticknor and Everett, assisted Lieber in his Encyclopaedia project, which was based not on the Encyclopaedia Britannica but on Hermann Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon, as Lieber indicated on his title page.
The actual wording of Lieber’s title page emphasizes the meaning he assigned to the use of a German model for an American encyclopedia. An opponent of what he called the “Germanizing of United States,” Lieber advocated the adoption of German academic methods within a nationalistic American culture, not a direct importation of German culture; his vision was for a blended national identity instead of American culture as a variation of an existing European culture.13 Nevertheless, Lieber maintained his pride in his identity as a German even as he embraced his new homeland. Thus, on his title page, rather than naming Brockhaus, Lieber cites “the German Conversations-Lexicon.” The anglicized spelling, together with the addition of the word “German”—which did not appear in Brockhaus’s title—argues for a unique cultural relationship between the Anglophone United States and German print culture, in fact a hybridized culture that could be simultaneously nationalistic and transatlantic.14
The Encyclopaedia Americana exhibits throughout a similar tension between the national and the international, particularly in articles on literature such as “Epic.” Much of the article builds on the critical theory of the genre as developed by August Schlegel and Jean-Paul Richter, but it starts out with a broad, etymologically based definition similar to Noah Webster’s: “Epic; a poem of the narrative kind. This is all that is properly signified by the word, although we generally understand by it a poem of an elevated character, describing the exploits of heroes.”15 By moving from etymology to usage to arrive at a more relevant definition, the article follows the methodology of J. G. Herder, whose The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry shaped romantic conceptions of national literature and culture in Germany as well as England and the United States.16 However, in this case the “we” who “generally understand” the definition applies not just to Germans or to Americans but to all who adopt a broadly Western poetics; Herder’s nation dissolves into the larger semantic republic of Goethe’s Weltliteratur (world literature). The article next offers a comparison between epic and drama, which resolves into a metaphor of extended travel, perhaps even of tourism: “The epic is not a hasty journey, in which we hurry towards a certain end, but an excursion, on which we take time to view many objects on the road, which the art of the poet presents to amuse us” (4:538). Throughout this article, epic is represented not as a form to promote national pride so much as a way of projecting national character out into the world of letters.
After discussing the variety of forms within epic, pointing to examples of romance epics (e.g., Orlando Furioso) and mock-epics (e.g., The Rape of the Lock) among others, the article provides a nation-by-nation overview of world-worthy epics. The role of epic in displaying a nation’s language, and thus providing evidence for philologists, is established at the very outset of this survey: “Who can calculate the great influence which Homer probably had on the Greek language? Whilst, on the other hand, it is partly owing to the plastic trait in the two ancient languages, that this characteristic was imparted to their epic poetry” (4:538). Among modern languages, English is the best for epic, owing to its capacity for “description,” the article argues. “Spenser, Milton, Glover, Butler, Pope, Scott, Byron, Moore, Campbell, Southey, and many other distinguished names” further speak to the language’s affinity for epic. By contrast, the French language is poorly adapted to epos, while the Italian language (in lieu of an Italian nation) has produced three great epics: Ariosto’s Orlando, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and Dante’s Divine Comedy—the last still relatively unknown to American readers at the time (4:539). The Germans have produced only one world-class epic, the Nibelungenlied, which had been only recently published and about which Lieber had personally written an article for the Encyclopaedia. Modern German writers, while prolific in the epic form, have fallen short of their ancient heritage: Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea, Voss’s Luise, and Klopstock’s Messiade are all criticized for obvious flaws of structure and conception. Spanish and Portuguese epics are quickly touched on (although CamÕes’s nationality is not identified), and a rapid summary of classical epic in Latin and Greek abruptly closes the article.
In a work claiming preeminence in providing the most important knowledge for Americans to have, the essay “Epic” contains a glaring absence. While the entry on Timothy Dwight noted that Dwight had written a “regular epic poem” in the 1770s in the Encyclopaedia’s entry on the Yale president (4:352), there is no mention of American authors—or even the existence of epic literature in the New World—in the article on epic. The closest to the United States the essay comes, despite its international range, is Ercilla’s La Aurucana, an account of one of the wars of conquest that the article excuses as a product of idiosyncratic Spanish taste, “a poem, which, to foreigners, generally appears like a dull chronicle, defective in poetical conciseness of language and originality of ideas” (4:539). Like Very, Lieber remains silent on the state of the epic art in the United States, which speaks to the sea change in American and European literary taste since the War of 1812 but also might involve a more insidious issue. Epics produced in the United States before 1830 had been distributed on a local or, at best, on a national scale, as in the case of Barlow’s Vision of Columbus. Even the London imprints of Barlow’s and Dwight’s works were made in small print runs, and rarely with the intention or actuality of continuing with later print runs. And only Barlow’s diplomatic career carried his works as far into Europe as France, and then more as a flash of revolutionary consanguinity than as a vote of critical confidence. If Europeans refused to talk about American epics, a very likely explanation was that Europeans had not even seen, much less read, American epics since the 1780s. Without effective transatlantic publishing networks, such as those from which Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper had benefited in the 1820s, American epics could not secure an international market and thus international critical attention. One exemplary network began developing in the mid-1830s, the friendship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, which paved the way for writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to secure European business connections—and which produced a remarkably rich dialogue surrounding the changing meaning of epic in the midst of a rapidly modernizing literary market.
A Philology of Epic: The Emerson-Carlyle Connection
Ralph Waldo Emerson had first crossed the Atlantic in 1833 in search of new purpose after the loss of his first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson. As part of his Wanderjahre Emerson visited his literary heroes, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. The Concord minister made a remarkable impression on Carlyle and his wife, the latter particularly suffering from the isolation of western Scotland; the three maintained a lifelong friendship thereafter, primarily through correspondence. And Emerson, already fascinated by the charismatic power of great men, told Carlyle in his first letter after their meeting that he believed that the Scotsman was an era-defining poet whose moment had arrived:
No poet is sent into the world before his time … all the departed thinkers & actors have paved your way … nations & ages do guide your pen … Believe then that harp & ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your Epical Song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations.17
Emerson’s use of “Epical Song” has a surprisingly broad sense for its time; Noah Webster’s definition in his 1828 Dictionary discussed “epic” as implying narrative and “epic poem” as denoting a work with conventions and aims similar to that of Homer’s Iliad. Carlyle had published only essays and portions of Sartor Resartus by the time Emerson met him—Emerson would in fact oversee the first complete printing of Sartor, which appeared in Boston in 1835—and had not yet launched his career as a historian, so we might ask how Emerson thought the “Epical Song” might appear. The Concord lecturer-to-be might have envisioned an intertextual epic, one that would emerge through Carlyle’s entire oeuvre, as it arguably had for Goethe. However, Emerson’s comment on his friend’s style, with its “volley of variations” rather than a “simple air,” suggests that the Epical Song might simply be the poetic truth that Carlyle expresses in his notoriously meandering Sartor Resartus, if he could just get to the point. The “[p]ure genuine Saxon” sentences that Carlyle would later praise in Emerson’s Essays, “strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty” (371), the powerful yet masterfully crafted directness of the English prose essay, not only could but should, Emerson seems to say, serve as the form for the latest epic creation. In fact, Emerson conceived of the essay, as related to the lecture, as a form-sans-form that could absorb even the all-absorbing genre of the epic; in the wake of the publication of his first series of Essays in 1841, Emerson commented to Carlyle that “I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture room—so free & so unpretending a platform,—a Delos not yet made fast—I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety—rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics & Pindarics, argument & confession” (308). The new formal possibilities for epic (via the essay) were virtually limitless for Emerson.
For Carlyle the timing of Emerson’s phrase was remarkable. The two had met in the summer of 1833, not long before Emerson’s return voyage to Massachusetts; the “Epical Song” letter is dated May 14, 1834, which puts it at the very end of Carlyle’s pivotal foray through Homer’s Iliad in the Greek.18 After failing to find a publisher for Sartor Resartus and searching for a suitable artistic model for his planned history writing, Carlyle had begun in January 1834 a slow, intensive study of Homer in the original Greek, alongside Johann Heinrich Voss’s translation of the Iliad into German hexameters. Carlyle, who had done serious translating work before and had despised Pope’s and Chapman’s translations of Homer, found his encounter with the Iliad in Greek and German together to be the revelation he had been seeking. Also instrumental to Carlyle’s Homeric study was Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. While he was astonished at the power of the Iliad, Carlyle found encouragement in the idea that the book was merely a masterful compilation of songs, a world made by editorial assembly. Carlyle now had his model; soon after his study of Homer, he began work on The French Revolution, which reviewers such as John Stuart Mill and Francis Espinasse called an “epic”; Thoreau referred to it as an “Iliad.”19 Carlyle’s own ambitions for the work were clear to his readers, and in a letter thanking Emerson in 1838 for overseeing an American printing of the book, his apologetic tone still rang with the epic impulse: “I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante or undying thing, that New England might boast in aftertimes of this feat of hers, and put stupid poundless and penniless Old England to the blush about it” (193). Carlyle’s reference to Dante rather than to Homer suggested the avant-garde nature of the Scotsman’s epic ambition. Dante only began receiving critical attention in Britain after Coleridge’s lectures in 1820, and George Ticknor had offered the first American college course on the Divina Commedia at Harvard in 1831. Until Longfellow’s and James Russell Lowell’s public advocacy of Dante studies, especially after the Civil War, Emerson’s and Carlyle’s reverence for Dante put them in a minority at the time of Carlyle’s letter. Although the Encyclopaedia Americana testified to Dante’s reputation in Europe and aided the growth of his reputation in America, epic was not yet so big a category in the United States as Emerson and Carlyle perceived it during the 1830s.
Carlyle would in fact become famous for expanding the definition of “epic.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites Carlyle’s comment on Shakespeare as the first instance in English of “epic” used in the sense of “a composition comparable to an epic”—a work that does epic work even if it does not exhibit a traditional epic structure.20 In the OED’s quotation, Carlyle is citing August Wilhelm Schlegel’s statement that Shakespeare’s history plays constitute “a national epic.” Here is the quote in context, the OED quotation appearing in italics: “August Wilhelm Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but what he had learned from Shakspeare. There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, epic;—as indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be.”21 Schlegel’s actual term in his Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809–11) is “Heldengedicht,” literally “hero-poem” and translatable as either “epic poem” or “heroic poem.” In a move similar to Lieber’s in the title page of his Encyclopaedia, Carlyle inserts the nation into his source, rendering Schlegel’s Heldengedicht as “National Epic.” Carlyle is careful to capitalize both the adjective and the noun, for in his discussion of Shakespeare they carry equal and interdependent importance. The work of Shakespeare explodes the definition of “epic” to include “all delineation by a great thinker,” going beyond even Jones Very’s claim for modern poetry. And the cultural capital involved in the term “epic” is exactly what makes Shakespeare not only great but useful.
Carlyle’s discussion of Shakespeare appears in the second half of his lecture “The Hero as Poet,” the first half of which focuses on Dante. In his tribute to the Florentine poet, Carlyle refuses to countenance the question of his utility: “The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his ‘uses.’ A human soul who has once got into that primal element of Song, and sung forth fitly somewhat there-from, has worked in the depths of our existence … in a way that ‘utilities’ will not succeed well in calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no value.” Dante thus stands for the ultimate romantic poet, one whose song can survive the absence of a market precisely because he will always find a fit audience though few; his transcendent genius “speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places.” In summarizing the greatness of Shakespeare, however, he considers the English bard “a real, marketable, tangibly useful possession.” Here the international power of epic, the cultural capital that the Schlegels saw in the form and that the Encyclopaedia article had touched on, is realized in Shakespeare as intellectual property—particularly as a nation’s intellectual property. The need for such property, Carlyle states, barely needs an argument: “England, before long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? This justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and government are here to accomplish.” The obstacles to Germany’s unification seem minute here in comparison with the sublimity of global space that separates the English-speaking parts of the world. Carlyle includes the United States in his Anglophone empire, which gives greater weight to his assertion that “Acts of Parliament” and “prime-ministers” cannot hold this virtual nation together. It is rather the heroic figure of “an English King, whom no time or chance, parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever?”22 Only an international readership of Shakespeare can defeat politics, national boundaries, and transoceanic distances in uniting Carlyle’s “Saxondom,” and thus Shakespeare the epic poet and Shakespeare the presiding genius of global Englishness are one and the same for Carlyle.
Emerson joined Carlyle in touting Shakespeare as the world’s greatest poet, passing over Homer and Dante in his choice of the playwright as his “representative man” for the figure of the poet. However, Emerson’s attitude as an American toward Shakespeare was more conflicted than Carlyle had anticipated in his vision of a transnational Bardophilia. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson famously declared that Shakespeare was actually an enemy of modern American innovation: “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.”23 This impatience with British influence on American culture extended even to Emerson’s relationship with Carlyle.
As the Concord lecturer pointed to increasingly cosmopolitan themes for his American audiences—all six of his subjects in Representative Men are European—he emphasized his American nationality abroad, both in public and in private. In one of his most sweeping epistolary passages, Emerson described to Carlyle his impressions of the Mississippi following his 1853 lecture tour:
The powers of the river, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap & cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes, for it yields to no engineering,—are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, & you shall see the distant dependence of aristocracy & civility on the fat fourlegs. Working-men, ability to do the work of the River, abounded, nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. Tis a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, & none of your selfish Italies and Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. (486)
Carlyle’s reply was all admiration, but it was now his turn to explain to Emerson what “Epical Song” he saw emerging in his work: “Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge do Model Republic, have here and there something of the epic in them,—ganz nach meinem Sinne” (489).24 Carlyle locates epic in the text, as he reads it—not as Emerson wrote it. By this time, epic has entirely moved for Carlyle into the eye of the beholder. And yet years later, Carlyle could relocate epic into Emerson’s authorial persona, as he found it in Society and Solitude (1870): “It seems to me you are all yr old self here, and something more. A calm insight, piercing to the very centre, a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful epic humour” (566–67). Epic was no longer in the eye of the beholder; it was in the soul of the author, if the beholder could perceive it. This kind of “indwelling epic,” we may say, was the product of a lifelong engagement with German Idealist philosophy, but also with an interlocutor who repeatedly refused to let Carlyle define him. At last this definition becomes a compliment, but the edge of power is still present. In the next section, we explore a different kind of definitional power, this time directed at anything within sensory range: the tyranny of Thoreau’s epic gaze at Walden Pond.
Thoreau’s Homeric Eyeball
If we might call Carlyle’s and Emerson’s approaches to epic “indwelling,” at least in the late correspondence, we might call Thoreau’s “internal epic.” For Thoreau, epic has little to do with external features or constitutional Geist in an object; rather, it is the gaze and reading of the subject that creates epic experience, and thus epic form. This gaze breaks down distinctions between parody, imitation, and originality, as Homeric echoes such as the “Battle of the Ants” passage in Walden show. The reading of “The Battle of the Ants” as mock-epic, accepted and developed by generations of Thoreau scholars, originated with an essay by philologist Raymond Adams in 1955, entitled “Thoreau’s Mock-Heroics and the American Natural History Writers.” In arguing that Thoreau’s introduction of mock-heroic descriptions into nature writing created an American literary tradition, he glosses an extended quotation from the ant battle with the following sentence: “When one talks about the hills and vales of a woodyard, a sunny valley and an eminent chip, the battle cry of an ant, the shield of an emmet whose Spartan mother sent him into battle, and the wrath of a pismire Achilles, one is using the method of the mock-epic.”25 Adams is correct that the materials of mock-epic are very present in this passage. However, the way in which Thoreau uses these devices amounts to something very different from what Adams suggests. McWilliams gives a much fuller assessment of this passage when he argues that Thoreau successfully combines the registers of high epic and mock-epic to create a humor-based American brand of heroism.26 Yet Thoreau’s understanding of epic and the traditions in which it participated encompassed ancient Asian as well as European texts, and his sense of genre was much more fluid than his critics have acknowledged. This sense opened new possibilities for authorial manipulation of earlier sources, even some of the most venerable of all.
As we have seen throughout this study, definitions of epic had become increasingly fluid following the Renaissance, and the decisive shift in definition from generic convention to cultural work was fairly complete by the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, poets such as Byron and Shelley were experimenting with a new poetic subgenre, the dramatic poem. Unlike the closet drama, which was written for the page but possible to stage, the dramatic poem required the indefinite space of the reader’s imagination to make the scenes work: in poems such as Manfred, Prometheus Unbound, and Longfellow’s The Golden Legend, the casts were too big, the locations and special effects too cinematic, for theatrical presentation. In a dramatic poem, what is unstageable in the world can be present to the mind, combining the interiority of the novel and the narrative poem with the visual and interpersonal conventions of the play. The dramatic poem is the ultimate reader’s drama. And an examination of Thoreau’s reading of epic in Walden suggests that his goal is to construct the ultimate reader’s epic, an epic that moves out of the limitations of traditional form to transform the known world into the inspired vision of the romantic author.
The first mention of an epic text appears in the chapter “Economy,” in which Thoreau comments on his scanty and haphazard reading during the weeks he builds his cabin: “In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.”27 Yet epic is already present before this point, as an Irish neighbor of the Collins family, whose hut Thoreau has just purchased, watches the dismantling, and that watching transforms the mundane, though vaguely tragic, scene: “He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy” (44). In the next chapter, the experience of nature after sunrise trumps the most sublime literary experiences: “Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical in it” (88–89). Here hearing the hum of a mosquito condenses Homer’s epics and their referents into a single “cosmical” moment. The mosquito passage is more earnest, more evocative; it is the observer side of Thoreau’s statement at the beginning of the chapter “Reading” that all men have the capacity to be both students and observers (99)—as with Emerson, study and attentive experience go together.
And by the time he reaches the chapter on reading, after quoting Latin and alluding to Chinese poetry, Thoreau’s student side emerges anew. We learn that he kept Homer’s Iliad on his table during the summer, though he read it very little (99–100). The very presence of Homer, it seems, is enough to inspire the man who was probably the most adept classicist in the transcendentalist circle; as Thoreau goes on to say, “A written word is the choicest of relics” (102). The purpose of reading the classics, of holding them, of keeping them, of owning them, is to learn to read them well, to imbibe their heroism. Thoreau declares, “To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem” (101–2). And this ability to read well is reserved only for the Miltonic fit audience, though few. This concept of the select audience that “gets” it, a vital part of the invention of romantic authorship and reinvented by the modernists, is what makes Chanticleer’s song intelligible, the cockcrow that Thoreau sets up as his epigraph “if only to wake my neighbors up.”28 Only the “uncommon school,” the “few scholars,” the “great poets,” can understand Homer as Thoreau does—and thus only they can understand the great poet-scholar Thoreau. The sage of Walden rejects translations of the classics and despises the popular literature that distracted the Greeks from Homer and that distracts Americans from the great books; only Homer is good enough for his mosquitoes.
But even as Thoreau takes pains to translate Homer from the Greek for his illiterate wood-chopper friend, he elsewhere quotes from Pope’s Homer. In fact, the only object that Thoreau ever mentions being stolen from his cabin is “one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded.” The smallness of the book suggests a reprint from the “cheap and fertile press,” and it was probably a translation, as Thoreau implies when he speculates that if everyone lived a life of simplicity, theft would disappear, and “the Pope’s Homers would soon get properly distributed” (100, 107). We may start to wonder how many copies of Homer Thoreau kept in that cabin. And the wood-chopper who needs the translation has learned only to parse the Greek and not to understand its meaning: “To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know” (144–45). How does one read well without reading? This wood-chopper Thoreau declares to be a “true Homeric or Paphlagonian man” (144)—can one be truly Homeric and not be able to read Homer? This conflation of innocence, ignorance, and genius not only endangers the power of the reader that Thoreau has supposedly just bestowed but also makes insects—some of the least grand of creatures—into the most Homeric, and the most epic, of all the characters in Walden: both the mosquito and the aforementioned ants.
The “Battle of the Ants” passage is based partly on a secondhand account of an ant battle recorded in Kirby and Spence’s Introduction to Entemology. The strange merger of science and art in Thoreau’s passage, of the epic and the encyclopedic, echoes that of his source. On pismerean warfare, Kirby and Spence bemoan their lack of epic rage:
[In the woods] you will sometimes behold populous and rival cities, like Rome and Carthage, as if they had vowed each other’s destruction, pouring forth their myriads by the various roads that, like rays, diverge on all sides from their respective metropolises, to decide by an appeal to arms the fate of their little world. As the exploits of frogs and mice were the theme of Homer’s muse, so, were I gifted like him, might I celebrate on this occasion the exhibition of Myrmidonian valour; but, alas! I am Davus, not Oedipus; you must, therefore, rest contented, if I do my best in plain prose; and I trust you will not complain if, being unable to ascertain the name of any one of my heroes, my Myrmi-donomachia be perfectly anonymous.29
The celebration of ant battles, if too lofty a task for these entomologists, becomes an opportunity for a Concord squatter to demonstrate how well—and how poetically—he has read his Homer.
As Patrick O’Connell has pointed out, Thoreau’s repeated characterization of the ants as Myrmidons highlights not only the Homeric allusion to Achilles’s great warriors but the story of the Myrmidons’ origin in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.30 The Myrmidons were once ants (the Greek for ant is myrmex) and were transformed into humans by the gods in order to repopulate the kingdom of Ancaeus, Achilles’s grandfather. The Myrmidons, according to Ovid, had superhuman, or rather antian, capacities for strength, endurance, and prowess in battle. As Thoreau watches his own ant battle, he comments that “I was myself excited somewhat even as if they [the ants] had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference” (230). It is worth noting that the battle in the “Brute Neighbors” chapter is not the first appearance of ants in Walden. Just a few paragraphs after the mosquito sings Homer’s requiem, Thoreau bemoans the haste of modern social life: “Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men” (91). This is a direct allusion to the Ancaeus story in Ovid, but it universalizes the myth such that, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, we are all humans, we are all Myrmidons. The problem with modern society, according to Thoreau, is that we have not shed enough of our brute ant-ness to fully realize our humanity—we are trapped in a Myrmidonian existence, not completely belonging to one sphere of life or the other. And it is this tension of placelessness that makes the “Battle of the Ants” passage so powerful and so difficult to categorize.
Thoreau begins the passage by describing two ants, a red one and a much larger black one, in mortal combat. After watching them transfixed for a few moments, he realizes that they are not alone; that he is witnessing “not a duellum, but a bellum,” an apocalyptic war between what he calls “red republicans” and “black imperialists” (228–29). The metonymy between the single combat (the duellum) and the war (the bellum) is patently epic, focusing the attention and the fate of the armies onto a representative pair, like Achilles and Hector or David and Goliath. However, the armies seem not to notice the duel, at least not as much as Thoreau does. After a second red ant joins the duel, Thoreau removes the wood chip that the three combatants stand on, and places it literally under a microscope, viewed through a tumbler with which he encases the ants on his window sill (230–31). Here Thoreau literalizes the mock-epic trope of placing the tiny subject under a microscope in order to magnify it (artificially) to epic stature. However, his emphasis on his own sight throughout this passage, as his emphasis on his own translation of Homer elsewhere in Walden, argues that epic is only in the eye of the poetic beholder. The power of Thoreau’s vision can transform anything into an epic subject, whether the mosquito’s buzz or the spectacle of the ant battle. The scale of the subject, the traditional determinant of a text’s epic stature, gives way to the scale of emotion, of affect, for Thoreau. As the mosquito affects him at least as much as “any trumpet that ever sang of fame,” so in watching the ants Thoreau confesses that “I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door” (231). Nor is Thoreau alone among ant-gazers in drawing conscious and specific political parallels to his subjects’ warfare. He quotes Kirby and Spence’s accounts of earlier ant battles, themselves recorded by earlier naturalists, which are described as occurring “in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth” and “previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden” (231–32). Thoreau, ever loyal to his sources even as he blatantly parodies them, offers his own historical frame: “The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill” (232).
To say that Thoreau is invoking mock-epic here only seems to make sense, but to continue on to say that the passage is in fact mock-epic claims more (or less) than I think the passage actually accomplishes. There is something universal, something “cosmical” about the ant battle, and for such a habitual punster as Thoreau, there is certainly also something comical about it. And yet the earnestness of his reactions, his need to find the Homeric in the environs of Walden Pond, pushes Thoreau to a solution to the problem of epic that faced contemporaries such as Whitman and Melville. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael defends his choice of the whale as his subject: “Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. … To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”31 And in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, in which Whitman declares that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” American poetic expression is to have a quality that “goes through” the epic “to much more.”32 Admittedly, Thoreau’s book is not about the flea (or the ant), but, like Wordsworth’s Prelude, about the possibilities of individual experience artistically remembered. But he can reach those sublime possibilities through the ant, through the epic, so that (according to Thoreau) the old form gains new life through the power of Thoreau’s imagination rather than falling by the wayside, as Whitman hoped epic would do. What Thoreau’s “Battle of the Ants” does is relocate epic within the mind of the poet, thus trumping the Western literary tradition while extending the empire of European romanticism into what would become the cosmical heart of the American canon.
Walt Whitman’s Epic Pursuits
Sharing that cosmical heart today is Walt Whitman, who called himself “a kosmos” and once observed that “[f]rom anything like a cosmical point of view, the entirety of imaginative literature’s themes and results as we get them to-day seems painfully narrow.”33 Whitman was the poet of the unsung, and especially later in his life his theme became the unsung-ness of the unsung. When he announced “I celebrate myself” to the world in 1855, he stressed in the first preface to Leaves of Grass and in newspaper puffs that he was taking up material never before celebrated in poetry: “Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista” (L, 619). The vista, Whitman’s rendition of the mount of vision, tied him to prior traditions even as it allowed him, like Barlow, to look across continents and centuries to find and reveal the new. And this new material called for a new kind of poetry, “indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic” (L, 619). This line has often been quoted to emphasize Whitman’s break from the past, but the poet reveals a fascinating tension in his relationship with his ancestors: the new work is not epic, but must go through it. Epic is the gateway to the new poetry, even if the new poet cannot remain in that form. According to Whitman’s own account, his engagement with poetry began with reading Walter Scott’s verse as a teenager, then the Bible, then “Shakespere [sic], Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them” (L, 479). This reading, which Whitman did outdoors, was in effect his apprenticeship as a poet, one that had an almost religious quality for him: “If I had not stood before those poems with uncover’d head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written ‘Leaves of Grass’ “(L, 478).
Yet Whitman did not acknowledge this debt until very late in his career; the above syllabus appeared in the 1888 essay “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” and by then, Whitman’s ideas about what he was doing as a poet had changed considerably. Even as he includes tales of war and national myth (such as the Alamo and John Paul Jones episodes) in his original Leaves of Grass, he seems determined in 1855 to leave epic behind him, to find a vista beyond traditional form. As that form continued to expand, however, and as Whitman’s own understanding of his relationship to other authors became less stark, he found that epic had somehow been pursuing him. By 1872, as he prepared the small volume As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Whitman described the fervor of the 1850s as “[t]he impetus and ideas urging me, for some years past, to an utterance, or attempt at utterance, of New World songs, and an epic of Democracy” (L, 647). While moving through epic, Whitman discovered after the fact that he had in fact settled there—or that it had settled on him. In the process, he also realized that his attempt to sing the great national poem had morphed into a celebration of “the great composite Democratic Individual,” of himself and/as the cosmos. The purpose of As a Strong Bird was to announce that while the “epic of Democracy,” Leaves of Grass, was now complete (in its fifth edition in 1872), he still intended to write the other half of his original project, “Democratic Nationality” (L, 651). In writing of himself as a representative and a comrade of all, Whitman decided that he had lost sight of the nation somewhere along the line.
Whitman had early on imbibed Herder’s idea that poetry represents the Geist of a nation, but his own emphasis on the centrality of the individual poet led him to sidestep the problem of Homeric authorship for modern writers; he refused to consider that it might not be possible for a single poet, a single Homer, to embody or represent a nation’s Geist. For Whitman, the new poetry was often not simply new but also in a way self-sufficient. In a notebook entry on the Nibelungenlied from around 1856, Whitman confronts the authorship issue as he summarizes many of the points from an essay on the poem he had recently read in Thomas Carlyle’s Critical Miscellanies, a piece that argued against the poem’s originating from an individual, original poet: “Probably dates back to about the 6th or 7th Century but the date when it was written as now, is the 13th century”; “Carlyle supposes it to be about the third redaction (digestion) from its primitive form”; “In their present shape these poems Heldenbuch, and Neibelungen, cannot be older than the twelfth century.” Finally, in an emphasis seemingly borne out of frustration with Carlyle’s denial of the poet’s individual genius, Whitman concluded his entry thus: “The poet himself is unknown—he probably made up the poem in the thirteenth century.”34 Rejecting Carlyle’s insistence that the poem is a mere digest of earlier myths and legends, Whitman insists that the poem is “made up,” composed anew by an individual poet. Through his view of the Nibelungenlied poet, Whitman imagines a bard who can work with prior materials without the anxiety of influence that he saw in American literature and feared in his own work. In an entry in Specimen Days titled “The Prairies and Great Plains in Poetry,” Whitman expressed his wish to see “all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless—altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe’s soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit” (P, 887). Here Whitman calls for a “perfect poem” that represents (though does not imitate) a landscape so unlike those in Europe that nothing European must remain in the poem; the perfect poem’s originality must encapsulate everything, yet also resist contamination and refuse to imitate—or more accurately, not try to imitate that which is “inimitable.”
By the time Whitman published this latest version of his nationalist manifesto in 1882, however, he had made his signature poem, titled “Song of Myself” by 1881, more epic than ever. This edition of Leaves was the first to change the opening line of “Song of Myself” from “I celebrate myself” to “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” (L, 662, 26). The 1872 edition, published the year of As a Strong Bird, had been the first to open the first poem with the words, “One’s-Self I sing.” The Virgilian cano had been a Whitmanian commonplace since the 1855 Leaves, but in the years following the Civil War it became more and more dominant in his poetry. At the same time, his confidence that the nation could be turned into a national literature waned. In 1891, responding to North American Review editor Lloyd Bryce’s request for an essay on America’s national literature, Whitman composed his response with the title: “American National Literature: Is there any such thing—or can there ever be?” Whitman concluded his essay with the same question, to drive the point home that the question was itself unanswerable (P, 1282–86). For a man who had set up his own standard in 1855 that “[t]he proof of the poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it,” the aged iconoclast found his country without a poet just as he had found himself without the benefit of his country’s absorption.
Yet there was always the future, the horizon, for Whitman. He wrote in the late 1880s that the nation’s “myriad noblest Homeric and Biblic elements are all untouch’d” (P, 1280), just as the future readers of “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and “Starting from Paumonok” would find Whitman waiting for them. This connection from the past was not without its risks: “Even in the Iliad and Shakspere [sic] there is (is there not?) a certain humiliation produced to us by the absorption of them, unless we sound in equality, or above them, the songs due our own democratic era and surroundings, and the full assertion of ourselves” (P, 1280). Epic was an oppressive force, but because of that it was also a challenge. But would that cycle ever end? Would not the next generation have to overcome and answer the great national poem, were it ever to come to be? The vision of futurity at the end of Whitman’s “Children of Adam” section of Leaves of Grass has him “[f]acing west from California’s shores … seeking what is yet unfound” (L, 95). He is full of both potential and experience, “a child, very old,” trying to close the circle of the globe back around to “the house of maternity, the land of migrations,” Asia. He wanders in imagination through all the continents and all the seas but is left not with vista but with a pair of parenthetical questions: “(But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)” (L, 95). Epic was by turns a champion to be defeated, a gateway to the new poetry, and a return to origins for Whitman. Perhaps no other writer of his time wrestled so deeply with the fitness of epic for his time, but as the following chapters will show, a range of writers—in novels, lyrics, drama, and the long poem—returned to those same questions. If epic was questionable as a goal at times, it effectively paved the road for American literature.
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