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INTRODUCTION: Epic Travels
1. Moulton, ed., Lewis and Clark Journals, 284.
2. Bergon, “Wilderness Aesthetics,” 129.
3. Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery, 192, 201.
4. Coues, “Preface to the New Edition,” v–vi.
5. Quaife, “Some New-Found Records,” 106.
6. Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery, 204.
7. Tucker, Epic, 1–2.
8. “Our New States,” 185, 192.
9. D. Jackson, ed., Letters, 1.13.
10. Bergon, “Wilderness Aesthetics,” 129. Though he does not comment on his choice, Gary Moulton, the editor of the most recent complete edition of the Journals, follows the same structure in his University of Nebraska abridged edition (cited above), tellingly subtitled “An American Epic of Discovery.”
11. Bergon’s preface to his edition emphasizes the importance of pluralism as a theme in the story of the expedition; Furtwangler argues cogently against the centrality of pluralism in the journey. See Bergon, ed., Journals of Lewis and Clark, x; Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery, 194.
12. Whitley, American Bards, 189.
13. Silva-Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture; Frank and Mueller-Vollmer, Internationality of National Literatures.
14. This is a corollary to David Quint’s argument in Epic and Empire that the losers’ perspective actually rewrites the form of epic from Virgil on down to Milton. In making that argument, Quint is one of the first comparative scholars of what is often called “secondary epic”—epic that originates in writing rather than in oral tradition—to analyze American works such as Joel Barlow’s Columbiad alongside European works.
15. John 18:38 (AV); Augustine, Confessions, 239.
16. Moretti, “Conjectures,” 57–58.
17. Davis and Joyce, comps., Poetry by Women to 1900.
18. Kazin, American Procession.
19. See Kaul, Poems of Nation; Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere; Loeffelholz, From School to Salon; V. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery; Sorby, Schoolroom Poets; Cavitch, American Elegy; McGill, ed., Traffic in Poems; M. Cohen, “Whittier, Ballad Reading”; Whitley, American Bards.
20. V. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 98.
21. Harrington, “Why American Poetry.”
22. Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative”; Dimock, Through Other Continents. On the history of the conflation of epic and novel, see Burrow, Epic Romance.
23. On the history of the concept of the Great American Novel, see Buell, “Unkillable Dream.”
24. Murnaghan, “Poetics of Loss in Greek Epic,” 203.
25. McWilliams, American Epic, 2.
26. Woloch, One vs. the Many, 3.
27. See Moretti, Modern Epic.
28. Dimock, “Genre as World System.” Both Moretti and Dimock take Immanuel Wallerstein’s work as their point of departure in their concepts of the world-system.
29. After the rise in interest in Asian literature in late eighteenth-century Europe, epicists numbered among the authors who included Asian texts in their own traditions; one example of this is Melville’s canto on The Ramayana in Clarel.
30. Eliot, Selected Prose, 38.
31. R. Ellison, Collected Essays, 185.
32. Davenant, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, 3.
33. C. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, 129.
34. For example, see P. DuBois, Rhetorical Description.
35. See Wells, Devil & Dr. Dwight; Wells, “Aristocracy”; D. Shields, Oracles of Empire; D. Shields, Civil Tongues; and Dowling, Poetry and Ideology.
36. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57.
37. Damrosch, What Is World Literature? 25–26.
38. Dimock, “Genre as World System.”
39. Benjamin, Illuminations, 88–89.
40. Moulton, Lewis and Clark Journals, 284n, 461.
PROLOGUE: Reading Epic
1. On the controversy surrounding Sandys’s translation as “the first utterance of the conscious literary spirit articulated in America,” see Davis, “George Sandys’ ‘Ovid,’” 297–98.
2. Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis (1632), 1.
3. For an excellent discussion of the history of this debate, as well as a modern case for the classification of Ovid as an epicist, see Otis, Ovid as Epic Poet.
4. J. Ellison, George Sandys, 158, 101–8, 107–8.
5. Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis (1626), “Dedication” (n.p.).
6. Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis (1632), 418, 389, 454. For a more extensive discussion of Sandys’s references to America, see Davis.
7. Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis (1626), “Dedication.”
8. Graeme, Poemata Juvenilia, l. 345; further citations will be given parenthetically.
9. Stabile, Introduction to The Most Learned Woman, 26–27.
10. Graeme’s friend and agent Elias Boudinot reported that the printers were unable to read her handwriting, a surprising statement if the fair copy now in the Library Company of Philadelphia was the copy they saw in 1793, when she finished her last revisions. For the publication history of Telemachus, see Ousterhout, Most Learned Woman, 320–30.
11. The two odes have never been published in print and are in the commonplace book made for the Willing sisters, presumably in the 1790s; the book is currently at Graeme Park.
12. Stabile, Introduction to The Most Learned Woman, 1.
13. Blecki and Wulf, eds., Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, 201.
14. The commonplace books for Penn, Williams, and Dickinson are all held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
15. The Dickinson gift copy, which is now held by the Library Company of Philadelphia, was the 1791 Philadelphia imprint by Henry Taylor; Robert Bell, the initial publisher of Paine’s Common Sense, had issued the first American edition of Paradise Lost in 1777. On the historiography of reading epic in the eighteenth century, see Reinhold, Classica Americana. For a recent study of the female reception of epic and other classical literature in early America, see Winterer, Mirror of Antiquity.
16. Brown, Power of Sympathy, 57.
17. Julian Mason has suggested John Wheatley, while John C. Shields has argued convincingly that Mather Byles is the likeliest candidate for Maecenas—though the patron in Wheatley’s poem seems to bear a resemblance to Alexander Pope as well. See J. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 3; J. Shields, “Phillis Wheatley”; Wheatley, Collected Works, 276–77.
18. Thoreau, Walden, 106.
19. Wheatley, Collected Works, 9; hereafter cited parenthetically.
20. John C. Shields, in his notes on “To Maecenas,” points out the considerable variance of speed through the Homer section of the poem; see Wheatley, Collected Works, 277n. For the Byles poem, see Byles, Poems on Several Occasions, 25–34.
21. Cuningham, Timothy Dwight, 26–27. One of George Sensabaugh’s most mystifying comments concerning Timothy Dwight is his statement that the future Yale president had read Virgil in Latin, but Homer only in Pope’s translation; see Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America, 166. Dwight’s study of Homer in Greek had been noted earlier and had been well documented long before Sensabaugh’s 1964 study. Perhaps Sensabaugh’s meaning is that Dwight used Homer through Pope in his poetry rather than through his own translations of Homeric ideas.
22. Howard, Connecticut Wits, 86.
23. Cuningham, Timothy Dwight, 237–39, 241–42.
24. Alexander Anderson, “Sketch of the Life of Dr. Alexander Anderson written by himself in his Seventy Third year, 1848,” in Papers. New York Public Library MssColl 98, 4.
25. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, 194.
26. Homer, Iliad of Homer (1808), title page. Jane R. Pomeroy has found that Anderson’s apprentice, Garret Lansing, did the engravings for the second volume of the Odyssey; See Pomeroy, Alexander Anderson, 1:323. Anderson had copied British designs for his work on an edition of Macpherson’s Ossian (1810) and Thomson’s Seasons (1810); see Pomeroy, 1.xliii.
27. Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 327.
28. See, for example, G., “Barlow’s Columbiad.” As recently as 1990, Michael Warner has misidentified Columbian type, made by the same foundry, with that used in the Columbiad; see Warner, Letters of the Republic, 121. John Bidwell has demonstrated that, while no evidence exists that Barlow commissioned a typeface for his poem, the poet did have a hand in selecting and purchasing the type; see Bidwell, “Joel Barlow’s Columbiad,” 356–59.
29. Bidwell, “Joel Barlow’s Columbiad,” 352, 379.
30. Howard, Connecticut Wits, 322; Bidwell, “Joel Barlow’s Columbiad,” 378–79; Barlow, Columbiad, iii–iv.
31. Bidwell, “Joel Barlow’s Columbiad,” 373–74.
32. Ibid., 377–78.
33. This copy is now in the Library Company of Philadelphia’s collection.
34. Jeffrey, “Columbiad,” 40. On Jeffrey’s authorship of this essay, see Griggs, Kern, and Schneider, “Early ‘Edinburgh’ Reviewers,” 206.
35. E. Lewis, “Ambiguous Columbiads,” 111, 114–17.
36. “A Ten-Inch Columbiad.”
CHAPTER 1. Diffusions of Epic Form in Early America
1. The first instance of a content-based definition of epic that I have found appears in Dyche’s New English Dictionary (1702). For the first half of the eighteenth century, lexicographers followed the approach of Phillips and others, but even before Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, definitions based on Dyche’s appeared in Wesley’s Complete English Dictionary (1753) and Martin’s Lingua Britannica Reformata (1754).
2. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2:365n.
3. Cavitch, American Elegy, 80–107.
4. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 508.
5. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2:365n, 2:366n.
6. See Herder, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, in which Homer and Ossian often appear together as the exemplary pair of oral poets.
7. Blair, “Critical Dissertation,” 354, 346, 358.
8. Seelye, “Flashing Eyes.”
9. Berkeley, “Verses,” 346. The poem was originally published in Berkeley’s Miscellany in 1752.
10. The text most familiar to students of the period is the 1772 composite text cowritten by Brackenridge and his classmate Philip Freneau. For the history of the text, see Smeall, “Respective Roles”; for critical analysis of the textual history of Rising Glory, see Wertheimer, Imagined Empires, 17–51.
11. Brackenridge and Freneau, Rising Glory of America, 24.
12. Trumbull, Fine Arts, 9.
13. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America, 166.
14. Dwight, “Proposals for Printing.”
15. Dwight, Major Poems, 18.
16. McWilliams, American Epic, 16.
17. J. Shields, American Aeneas, 218.
18. On the composition history of Conquest and its related poems, see Howard, Connecticut Wits, 83–85, 93–96.
19. It was also the basis for Dwight’s “Columbia,” which was included in Elihu Hubbard Smith’s 1793 anthology American Poems.
20. Dwight, Major Poems, 11–12. The full title of the poem is America: Or, a Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies; Addressed to the Friends of Freedom, and Their Country.
21. For a typical reading of Joshua as Washington, see Silverman, Timothy Dwight, 33–34.
22. See Wertheimer, Imagined Empires, 52–90.
23. Snowden, Columbiad, 46; further citations will be given parenthetically.
24. McWilliams, American Epic, 37.
25. Ousterhout, State Divided, 117–20.
26. The first source mentioned is Palmer, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists, 811. The second source is an anonymous obituary for Snowden in the Saturday Evening Post.
27. Snowden, American Revolution, 1:43–47.
28. The best account of Dwight’s family’s experience during the war and its influence on his poetry is Kafer, “Making of Timothy Dwight.”
29. Dwight, Major Poems, 255, 324.
30. For a full treatment of the publication and revision history of Branagan’s antislavery poetry, see Phillips, “Epic, Anti-Eloquence.”
31. Branagan, Tyrant, 71. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Tyrant.
32. Branagan, Avenia, 171. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Avenia.
33. See, for example, Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, v–vii.
34. J. Dryden, Virgil’s Aeneid, 377.
35. Pope, Preface to The Iliad of Homer, 1.n.p.
36. J. Shields, American Aeneas, 216–51; R. Kendrick, “Re-Membering America.”
37. Morton, Beacon Hill, 13. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Beacon.
38. Beattie, Minstrel, v.
39. See King, Romantic Autobiography.
40. For the publication history of Beacon Hill, see Phillips, “Fragmenting the Bard.”
41. Jung, Fragmentary Poetic.
42. Morton, Virtues, iv. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Virtues.
43. N. Webster, Grammatical Institute, 4, 5.
44. Barlow, Columbiad, vii–ix.
45. Lewalski, Life of John Milton, 410; Ellwood, History of the Life, 314. Lewalski doubts that Ellwood actually inspired Paradise Regained, though she does accept Ellwood’s account of Milton telling Ellwood (ironically or otherwise) that he had in fact inspired it; see 450–51.
46. Ellwood, Davideis, 13. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
47. Timothy Dykstal has argued that Cowley developed his poem while in exile in France, where he was probably influenced by Catholic works such as Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis (1526), Du Bartas’s Judit (1574), and Marino’s La Strage de gli Innocenti (1610). See Dykstal, “Epic Reticence,” 96.
48. In addition to the five London editions and one Dublin edition identified by Walther Paul Fischer in his study of Ellwood, I have identified the following American imprints: 1751 & 1760, printed by Franklin & Hall (Philadelphia); 1754 by James Chattin (Philadelphia); 1764 by James Adams (Wilmington, DE); 1785 by Joseph Crukshank (Philadelphia); 1792 by Eliphalet Ladd (Dover, DE); 1797 by Joseph Johnson and Samuel Preston (Wilmington, DE). See Fischer, Introduction to Thomas Ellwood’s Davideis.
49. Whittier, Poetical Works, 2:422.
50. The first attribution of The Gospel Tragedy to Brockway is apparently Dexter, Graduates of Yale College, 3:271.
51. According to federal records, Hutchins held the copyright to Brockway’s poem. See Gilreath, ed., Federal Copyright Records, 85.
52. Hutchins, “Proposal.”
53. Dexter, Graduates of Yale College, 3:270.
54. Brockway, Gospel Tragedy, iii. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
55. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 166–93.
56. Dwight, Major Poems, 545–46.
57. In 1795, Dwight’s Dissertation was reprinted in New York as an appendix to Samuel Jackson Spratt’s The Sublime and the Beautiful of Scripture.
CHAPTER 2. Constitutional Epic
1. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 362.
2. Quoted in Slauter, Origins of the Constitution, 33–34.
3. J. Adams, Defence, 365, 366.
4. Quoted in Schulman, American Republic, 128.
5. Ibid., 128–29.
6. Richard, Founders and the Classics, 10.
7. Adams, Adams, and Jefferson, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 538.
8. See Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” in Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 293–304.
9. Carl J. Richard’s discussion of the Founders’ knowledge of the classics is the best available; see Richard, Founders and the Classics, esp. 12–38. For a broader narrative of the place of classics in early American education, see Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 10–43.
10. Slauter, Origins of the Constitution.
11. Jefferson, Writings, 1501.
12. Slauter, Origins of the Constitution, 104–6.
13. For Burke’s “calculus of motives,” see his discussion of constitutional dialectics in Burke, Grammar of Motives, 323–401, esp. 377–78.
14. Ketcham, James Madison, 46.
15. G. Kennedy, “Classical Influences,” 138.
16. See ibid., 119–38; Gummere, American Colonial Mind, 173–90; Reinhold, Classica Americana, 102–5.
17. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist, 323. All subsequent citations of this work will be given parenthetically.
18. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic, 151–71; Slauter, Origins of the Constitution, 63–85.
19. My reading of Montesquieu is based in part on Ferguson, Law and Letters, 42–49.
20. Pope, Poetry and Prose, 46.
21. In describing this critique of Montesquieu, my reading of Federalist 47 is closer to Jack Rakove’s, who sees Madison as arguing that “Montesquieu could not have meant what his popular interpreters claimed he meant” regarding separation of powers, than to either Gary Rosen’s reading of the review of state constitutions at the end of the essay as “a corrective” to Montesquieu or Slauter’s assertion that Madison saw Montesquieu as making “a mistaken assumption that the British Constitution was a ‘perfect model’ rather than simply one example.” In fact, I read Madison as pushing forward precisely the idea that Montesquieu used the British Constitution as a gold standard, in order to make a larger point about the practice of political criticism. Rakove, “Madisonian Moment,” 490; Rosen, “Problem of Founding,” 574; Slauter, Origins of the Constitution, 121.
22. Quoted in Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 96; for the list of Jefferson’s epics in his library, see Gilreath and Wilson, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 111–12.
23. Jefferson, Writings, 618, 619.
24. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 63–64.
25. The range of possible referents for “Publius” is considerable, as well as unusual for one of Hamilton’s Plutarchian choices, which tended to be figures such as Pericles. Besides Virgil, Ovid and Terence both shared the first name “Publius.”
26. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 478.
27. For bibliographic information, see Brunet, Manuel du libraire, 2:130. The Madison copy of L’Iliade d’Homère (Paris, 1809), formerly part of Jay Fliegelman’s collection, is now in Skillman Library at Lafayette College. Based on my examination of the Madison copy, as well as copies held at the Grolier Club and the Morgan Library, it seems likely that each copy was customized for the owner, either before or soon after the presentation of each book, further indicating the importance of the book as a personal gift object.
28. Quoted in C. Smith, James Wilson, 308.
29. McCloskey, Introduction to Works of James Wilson, 1:37.
30. Wilson, Works, 1:412.
31. Ibid., 1:400.
32. Chisholm v. Georgia, 1793 U.S. LEXIS 249, at *462–63.
33. D. Webster, Speeches, Volume 2, 515. All subsequent references to Webster’s speech will appear parenthetically.
34. For the “liberty and union” passage in Webster’s “Reply to Hayne,” see D. Webster, Speeches, Volume 1, 347–48. Note the difference in the reported version, 393, from the official published version.
35. My definition of ekphrasis derives mainly from the eighteenth-century sense of the term: it is a rhetorical device whereby an object of visual art is represented in language. My definition differs slightly in that, following James A. W. Heffernan, I view the work of language as representative and not merely descriptive. As I show in my discussion of Iliad XVIII in this section, Homer represents Achilles’s shield, but his representation is not only descriptive but also narrational. See Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3, 14.
36. Among the more famous attempts are the one by Henry Flaxman in designing a cast model that now resides in the Royal Collection in London and the various versions of Benjamin West’s Thetis Bringing the Armor to Achilles, which West had initially intended for sale to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts around 1807 (the academy declined to purchase it). West’s engagement with epic as an artistic concept is addressed at length in chap. 3.
37. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, Add. MS 4808, ff.81v. British Library. For an online image of Pope’s manuscript drawing, see “Image from Alexander Pope’s ‘Iliad,’” British Library Online Gallery, last accessed February 21, 2011, www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/pope/large17438.html.
38. Homer, Iliad (1974), 453.
39. Andrew Sprague Becker has argued convincingly that lines 417–20 (Homer, Iliad [1974], 448), describing Haephestus’s appearance with statues that moved like virgins, foreground all of the major representative possibilities for the rest of Iliad XVIII. See Becker, Shield of Achilles, 79.
40. Office of the Curator, Supreme Court of the United States, “The Bronze Doors: Information Sheet,” United States Supreme Court, last updated May 4, 2010, www.supremecourtus.gov/about/bronzedoors.pdf.
41. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:268.
42. Marshall, Major Opinions, 174.
43. Ibid., 174–75.
44. Reynolds, Discourses, 112.
45. LaRue, Constitutional Law as Fiction, 86.
CHAPTER 3. Epic on Canvas
1. For example, see Paulson, Literary Landscape, 75; Lindsay, J. M. W. Turner, 99.
2. Pye, Notes and Memoranda, 34–35.
3. Cole, “Letter to Critics,” 230.
4. Truettner, “Two Coles,” 153–55.
5. Dillenberger, Benjamin West, 44–45; Alberts, Benjamin West, 158.
6. Bromley, Philosophical and Critical History, 1:56, 2:xxv, xxviii, xxxiv.
7. Ibid., 2:xxxiv–xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxix–xlii.
8. For a helpful overview of history painting and its significance for early American artists, see Mitnick, “History of History Painting,” Picturing History, 29–43.
9. Richardson, Works, 10–11, 17.
10. Reynolds, Discourses; see esp. 325–37 from the fifteenth and final lecture, which is essentially an apology for Michelangelo as the “exalted Founder and Father of modern art.”
11. Richardson himself was renowned as a portrait painter, but he also pursued literary criticism; he and his son wrote an influential volume on Paradise Lost, a work that Richardson had encountered while apprenticing in John Riley’s studio. See Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson, 30.
12. Reynolds, Discourses, 123.
13. Alberts, Benjamin West, 274–75, 214.
14. Ibid., 54.
15. See Mitchell, “Death of Nelson,” 265–66.
16. Quoted in ibid., 266.
17. Alberts, Benjamin West, 326.
18. Farington, Diary, 3:226.
19. Quoted in Erffa and Staley, Paintings of Benjamin West, 220.
20. “Fine Arts. Death of Lord Nelson,” 186.
21. Farington, Diary, 4:151.
22. The later provenance of West’s Nelson seems to bear some relationship to this; his original now hangs in the Liverpool Art Museum, while Devis’s Nelson is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
23. “Mr. West’s Picture,” 1. The original review, as the Herald states, was an “English publication,” though I have not been able to trace it.
24. “New Painting.”
25. Alberts, Benjamin West, 348, 352–53. West had earned only £35,000 from his court appointment across more than thirty-five years, while his P.R.A. predecessor Reynolds had averaged above £6,000 annually from his portrait commissions. See Dillenberger, Benjamin West, 112.
26. Erffa and Staley, Paintings of Benjamin West, 350; Dillenberger, Benjamin West, 117.
27. Haydon, Diary, 1:463.
28. Dillenberger, Benjamin West, 118–19.
29. Mitchell, “Death of Nelson,” 268.
30. Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, 273.
31. Ganwell and Tomes, Madness in America, 31. The manuscript of the Notioniad, along with an earlier fragment from a poem Nisbet called the Cattawassiad, is in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
32. I borrow the term “absorption” from Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, in recognition of Fried’s argument that absorption was the goal of artistic experience as the grand machine style of painting was developed, a style to which West was particularly indebted.
33. Christ Rejected, 4, 8.
34. Carey, Critical Description, 99–100.
35. Galt, Life, Studies, and Works, 2:203.
36. Alberts, Benjamin West, 411.
37. Barry, Opie, and Fuseli, Lectures on Painting, 382, 383.
38. Carey, “Letter,” 2.
39. The Academy would eventually mortgage its building in 1835 to purchase Death on the Pale Horse, and it later acquired Christ Rejected as a gift from Philadelphia art collector Joseph Harrison, Jr., one of the last public champions of American Grand Manner history painting, who bought the work in 1859 in order to keep it in Philadelphia. Goodyear, “History of Pennsylvania Academy,” 23, 33; Nutty, “Sartain and Harrison,” 52–53. Penn’s Treaty and John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne at Naxos were also part of the Harrison gift.
40. The best history of the Capitol rotunda commissions is Fryd, Art and Empire, 9–61.
41. Kloss, Samuel F. B. Morse, 136–39. Kloss presents several theories to explain Morse’s rejection and persuasively suggests that Morse’s own hard-line nativism had made him politically unsuitable by the 1830s.
42. Philadelphia’s art community had faced similar struggles in earlier years. Charles Willson Peale organized the Columbianum in 1794 as an association and academy for artists, but lack of funding and membership ruined it quickly. The Pennsylvania Academy had a board of over sixty members when it began in 1805, but Peale lamented that he was only one of three artists among a board of bankers, merchants, and lawyers. The taste for history painting at the Pennsylvania Academy may be tied to its leadership of rich connoisseurs, though the preference for American artists made it more inclined to buy and exhibit new works than Trumbull’s similarly populated Academy. For a brief narrative of this history, see Goodyear, “History of Pennsylvania Academy.”
43. Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse, 169–70.
44. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2:377.
45. Morse, “Lecture Notes 1–8 (b),” Papers.
46. Morse, Lectures, 61.
47. Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse, 171, 169.
48. For example, see “Fuseli’s Lectures”; “Lectures on Painting”; “Professor Howard’s Concluding Lecture.”
49. Morse, “Exhibition,” 5.
50. Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 24–27. As Parry explains, the story of Cole’s discovery had quickly become lore; for versions published shortly after Cole’s death, see Bryant, Orations and Addresses, 8; Noble, Life and Works, 34–36.
51. Quoted in Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 26.
52. Dunlap, Rise and Progress, 3:149.
53. Dunlap, “American”; quoted in Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 25–26.
54. Wallach, “American Empire,” 24–25.
55. One of the first examples of this narrative is Noble, Life and Works, 4–5.
56. Wallach, “American Empire,” 26–28.
57. Truettner and Wallach, eds., Landscape into History, 164; Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 21.
58. See Truettner, “Two Coles.”
59. Quoted in Wallach, “American Empire,” 42.
60. On the influence of Martin’s Paradise Lost mezzotints and other works on Cole, see Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 87–89.
61. Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 73–75; Wallach, “American Empire,” 79–82.
62. Noble, Life and Works, 7; Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 76–77.
63. See Truettner, “Two Coles.”
64. “Cole’s Pictures”; “Course of Empire,” 513.
65. Quoted in Wallach, “Course of Empire,” 378.
66. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 2:160.
67. For the history of moving panoramas in the United States, see Oettermann, Panorama, 323–40.
68. Wallach, “Voyage of Life,” 241.
69. “Apollo Gallery.”
70. Hofland, “Fine Arts,” 50. For references to Salvator and Claude, see Wallach, “American Empire,” 55.
71. “Art Union Pictures,” 13.
72. “World of Art,” 307.
73. “Our Landscape Painters,” 30. For contemporary reviews of Mercy’s Dream, see Gerdts, “Bunyanesque Imagery.”
74. “Art Union Pictures,” 13.
75. “Fine Arts: Obituary.”
76. See, for example, Wallach, “Course of Empire”; A. Miller, Empire of the Eye. Patricia Junker makes a similar argument for Cole’s Prometheus Bound.
77. Noble, Life and Works, 287–88.
78. “Cole Gallery.”
79. Gerdts, “Bunyanesque Imagery,” 174–75. The most extensive bibliographic treatment of Bunyan’s popularity in America is D. E. Smith, “Bunyan’s Works in America.”
80. Bryant, Orations and Addresses, 34.
81. Lanman, “Epic Paintings,” 355.
82. Ibid.
83. Cole’s manuscript description of the painting includes an extended quotation from Elizabeth Barrett’s poetry. Cole, Prometheus Bound. Curatorial files.
84. Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 188–90.
85. Junker, “Cole’s Prometheus Bound,” 37–42.
86. Ibid., 37.
87. Cole Family Scrapbook II, McKinney Library, Albany Institute of History and Art. Copy in curatorial files on Cole’s Prometheus Bound.
88. “George H. Story.”
89. Patricia Junker, memo, Jul. 8, 1999, in curatorial files on Cole’s Prometheus Bound.
90. Talbot, Jasper F. Cropsey, 19.
91. “Art and Artists” (December 1851), 149.
92. Sweeney, “Advantages of Genius,” 123–25.
93. E. Clark, History of National Academy, 64–65.
94. Quoted in Inness, Writings and Reflections, 107.
95. H., “Noble Picture,” 1i. The North American, a Philadelphia newspaper, had reprinted this item from an unidentified issue of the New York Gazette and Times. The critic quoted at length from this article in a later piece on Leutze in the 1849 Bulletin of the American Art-Union, 16–17. Mark Thistlethwaite has posited that the author of the article is Henry Walter Herbert, an English-born critic and sports writer; Mark Thistlethwaite, personal e-mail, Oct. 2, 2008.
96. “Art and Artists” (November 1851), 130.
97. Jarves, Art-Idea, 213–14.
98. “Rothermel’s New National Painting,” 2; quoted in Thistlethwaite, Art of Rothermel, 52.
99. Coddington, “Rothermel’s Paintings,” 8–16, 25–26.
100. “Battle of Gettysburg.”
101. Hobbs, 1876, 18; Thistlethwaite, “Sartain and Rothermel,” 40–41.
102. On the reception of Rothermel’s Gettysburg, see Hobbs, 1876, 18; Thistlethwaite, Art of Rothermel, 21–22.
103. Johns, Thomas Eakins, 47.
104. H. Adams, Eakins Revealed, 216–17.
CHAPTER 4. Transcendentalism and the “New” Epic Traditions
1. Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 77–98.
2. For a helpful summary of the Homeric question’s place in American intellectual life, see Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 84–92. For examples of American responses to Wolf’s ideas, see “Prologomena ad Homerum”; and “Homer.”
3. For a discussion of Thomas Cole’s role in this culture war as an unrecognized advocate of Bunyan, see chap. 3.
4. “The Pleasures of the Pen,” 108.
5. J. N. D., “John Bunyan.”
6. “Notices.—Editor’s Table.”
7. Carlyle, Heroes, 94.
8. Subsequent quotations of Very’s essay are taken from Essays and Poems and are cited parenthetically in the text.
9. Gittleman, Jones Very.
10. P. Miller, ed., Transcendentalists, 343.
11. Gittleman, Jones Very, 98–100.
12. Perry Miller declared Very’s “Epic Poetry” to be “practically unique in American criticism” in its use of the German critical distinction between classical and modern aesthetics; see P. Miller, Transcendentalists, 343.
13. T. Kennedy, “Francis Lieber,” esp. 31.
14. Lieber claimed to have introduced the words “nationalism,” “internationalism,” “interdependence,” and “Pan-American” into American English through his political writings; see Heath, “American English,” esp. 224.
15. Lieber, Encyclopaedia Americana, 4:537; further citations will be given parenthetically. The author of the “Epic” article is unknown; Lieber’s authorship has only been determined for thirteen articles in the entire Encyclopaedia; for the titles of Lieber’s known articles, see T. Kennedy, “Francis Lieber,” 48n.
16. Herder, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In introducing his discussion of the meaning of “prophet” in Hebrew culture, Herder explains his method: “Let us inquire into the conception attached to the word not by tracing etymologies, which are always unsafe guides, but by observing the obvious use of the term at different periods of time”; see 2:49.
17. Emerson and Carlyle, Correspondence, 99; further citations will be given parenthetically.
18. John Clubbe gives a helpful account of Carlyle’s study of Homer, along with its later implications for his work as a writer, in his essay “Carlyle as Epic Historian.”
19. Clubbe, “Carlyle as Epic Historian,” 120–21.
20. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Epic.” 3rd ed. 0-www.oed.com.libcat.lafayette.edu/.
21. Carlyle, Heroes, 93; final italics are Carlyle’s.
22. Ibid., 85, 96, 97.
23. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 58.
24. The German translates, “according to my sense.”
25. R. Adams, “Thoreau’s Mock-Heroics,” 89.
26. McWilliams, American Epic, 7–9.
27. Thoreau, Walden, 45; further citations will be given parenthetically.
28. The Princeton edition of Walden, though a Modern Language Association Approved Text, omits Thoreau’s epigraph, which appears in the first edition (Boston, 1854).
29. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 327.
30. O’Connell, “‘Battle of the Ants.’”
31. Melville, Moby-Dick, 456.
32. Whitman, Leaves, 616, 619.
33. Ibid., 680; Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 1280; further citations from both of these volumes will be given parenthetically, designated as L and P, respectively. Some of the thinking for this section has been spurred by Wai Chee Dimock’s recent essay “Epic and Lyric.”
34. Whitman, Notebooks, 1813.
CHAPTER 5. Tracking Epic through The Leatherstocking Tales
1. Lukács, Historical Novel, 64. As McWilliams points out, neither Cooper nor any other American text is featured in Lukács’s main epic-to-novel study, The Theory of the Novel; see McWilliams, American Epic, 5.
2. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 55.
3. McWilliams, American Epic, 136–44. Geoffrey Rans also sees Mohicans as the most epic of Cooper’s works, while George Dekker has argued that The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, a novel based on King Philip’s War, deserves that title. See Rans, Cooper’s Leather Stocking Novels, 118–29; Dekker, American Historical Romance, 335–37.
4. Quoted in Chase, American Novel, 16.
5. On the history of the idea of the Great American Novel, see Buell, “Rise and ‘Fall’ “; Buell, “Unkillable Dream.” For the “Iliad of the Blacks” reference, whose original source has never been identified, see “Uncle Tomitudes,” 98.
6. Buell, “Unkillable Dream,” 139–40.
7. “Aunt Tabitha Timpson,” 148. The Gazette gives the New York Transcript as the source for the story.
8. “Novels,” 419.
9. E. D., “Modern Fiction,” 344.
10. Bryant, Orations and Addresses, 79.
11. Cooper, “Literary Notices,” 363–64.
12. Cooper, Lionel Lincoln, 4.
13. Cooper, Leatherstocking Tales, 1:101; further citations will be given parenthetically.
14. Cooper, Letters and Journals, 2:99.
15. “Novel Writing,” 20.
16. I adapt this catalog of Cooper’s genres from Howard Mumford Jones’s “Prose and Pictures,” 136–37; quoted in Shulenberger, Cooper’s Theory of Fiction, 5.
17. Dekker and McWilliams, eds., Fenimore Cooper, 5.
18. Noble, Life and Works, 169, 166.
19. For Goethe’s and Schiller’s discussion of the idea of “epic deferral,” see Goethe and Schiller, Correspondence, 181–91. The translation “epic deferral” is taken from Barchiesi, “Virgilian Narrative: Ecphrasis,” esp. 278.
20. Dekker and McWilliams, Fenimore Cooper, 196, 195.
21. Woolman, Journal and Major Essays, 24–25.
22. Cooper, Home as Found, 1:222; Cooper, Wish-Ton-Wish.
23. Pease, Introduction to The Deerslayer, vii, xii.
CHAPTER 6. Lydia Sigourney and the Indian Epic’s Work of Mourning
1. Whitman, Leaves, 668, 672, 697, 690. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically.
2. Etymologist [pseud.], “‘Yonnondio.’”
3. Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 5:469–70.
4. Folsom, Whitman’s Native Representations, 79.
5. See chap. 5 of McWilliams, American Epic; Sayre, Indian Chief, 30.
6. Eighteenth-century poets such as Edward Young, Thomas Parnell, and Thomas Gray were often seen as progenitors of this mode; see Warnke, Preminger, and Metzger, “Graveyard Poetry.” Sigourney was frequently mentioned in this context alongside poets such as Felicia Hemans, indicating that the sentimental mourning of the graveyard poetry was a transatlantic phenomenon well into the nineteenth century.
7. Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 4–12.
8. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 327.
9. “Traits of the Aborigines,” 260, 258.
10. Sigourney, Traits of the Aborigines, 3. All subsequent citations of this text will be given parenthetically.
11. “[I]n spirit perhaps he [Adam] also saw / Rich Mexico … Cusco … Atabalipa … Guiana … El Dorado.” Milton, Paradise Lost, 270.
12. “Traits of the Aborigines,” 262.
13. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 327.
14. Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 23, 25–26; Sigourney, Letters of Life, 327.
15. Nina Baym notes the discrepancy between Haight’s and Sigourney’s account of the composition of Traits’s notes, but she refrains from making an argument for either one; see Baym, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 396. Lauter quotes the relevant passage in Sigourney’s Letters, but in order to take issue with Martha Bacon’s characterization of Sigourney in Puritan Promenade; see Lauter, “Teaching Lydia Sigourney,” 112.
16. I have assumed the feminine pronoun in describing Sigourney’s speaker because her other writings on the subject of Indian missions and the importance of native voices in American history indicate a very close resemblance between Sigourney’s prose rhetoric and that of Traits’s speaker.
17. Bennett, “Was Sigourney a Poetess,” 276.
18. Eastburn and Sands, Yamoyden, vii.
19. Kettell, Specimens of American Poetry, 2:228.
20. Verplanck, ed., Writings of Sands, 1:12–13.
21. Anthologies giving the poem as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s include Kilcup, ed., Native American Women’s Writing, 60–63; and Watts and Rachels, eds., First West, 335–37. Paula Bernat Bennett anthologizes “Invocation: To My Maternal Grandfather,” mentioning in a footnote that Jane Schoolcraft had also written “The Otagamiad,” in American Women Poets, 395. Maureen Konkle also mentions the “Otagamiad” as Jane Schoolcraft’s poem; see Konkle, Writing Indian Nations, 172.
22. Schoolcraft, Sound the Stars Make, 258–59.
23. Ruoff, “Early Native American Women,” 84. On the difference between Henry’s and Jane’s styles, see Schoolcraft, Sound the Stars Make, 258.
24. P. Mason, ed., Literary Voyager, 182–83.
25. Ibid., 142–43. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is not an attributed author on the title page of Mason’s edition, though he credits her in his introduction and notes with making many contributions.
26. Ibid.
27. Warren, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, 149–53.
28. A summary of Oestreicher’s findings can be found in Oestreicher, “Unraveling the Walam Olum.”
29. Tedlock, Foreword to “Walam Olum,” 96. The Multilingual Anthology dates the poem as “before 1833,” apparently basing the date on Rafinesque’s own claim to have translated the work in 1833. Oestreicher has established that the Walam Olum dates from 1834 at the earliest; See Oestreicher, “Unraveling the Walam Olum,” 239–40.
30. Warren, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, 148.
31. Rafinesque, American Nations, 4. All subsequent references to this text will appear parenthetically.
32. Rafinesque, World; or, Instability, 9.
33. Sayre, Indian Chief, 27–29. Sayre draws on David Quint’s analysis of the epic curse and its imperial implications in Quint, Epic and Empire, 99–130.
34. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 338–39.
35. Sigourney, Zinzendorff, 14. All subsequent citations of this text will be given parenthetically.
36. Mark 15:39 (AV).
37. Quoted in Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 123–24.
38. “The Thinker.”
39. “Fierce Wars and faithful Loves shall moralize my Song.” Morton, Ouâbi, title page.
40. “Yonnondio,” 96.
41. V. Jackson, “Bryant,” 196, 193.
42. Quoted in ibid., 199.
43. Ann Uhry Abrams sees Sigourney’s Pocahontas as a composite of the versions put forth by John Gadsby Chapman in his painting The Baptism of Pocahontas, Seba Smith’s Powhatan, and Robert Dale Owen’s Pocahontas: A Historical Drama—a remarkable blend of forms. Abrams, Pilgrims and Pocahontas, 133–34.
44. Sigourney, Pocahontas, 13. All subsequent citations of this text will be given parenthetically.
45. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 347.
46. Tilton, Pocahontas, 92, 96. For an account of Chapman’s campaign for the commission, see 102–5; for an analysis of the painting and its place in antebellum cultural politics, see 116–40.
47. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 347.
48. See Tilton, Pocahontas, 118–19.
49. Canticles 2:1 (AV).
50. Sayre, Indian Chief, 273, 289.
51. “Yonnondio,” 96.
52. Levine, “Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney,” 1029.
53. Everett, “Mrs. Sigourney,” 247.
54. Ibid., 247.
55. Sigourney, Illustrated Poems, 24; further citations of “Oriska” will be given parenthetically from this source.
56. Emerson, Letters, 8:464.
57. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 121.
58. Squier, “Historical and Mythological Traditions,” 177.
59. For a brief narrative of Copway’s life, see D. B. Smith, “Life of George Copway.”
60. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 123.
61. See the note in Copway, Ojibway Conquest, 86–87.
62. This is similar to the accusation that Jane Johnston Schoolcraft counters concerning her grandfather’s heritage in her “Invocation: To My Maternal Grandfather,” suggesting that the source of Ojibway Conquest might have some relationship to the Johnstons’ Ojibwe connections.
63. According to Warren Upham, the previous name of the St. Louis River was in fact Ojibwe, “Kitchigumi zibi,” meaning “Lake Superior river.” This suggests that Copway’s geography overlaps considerably with Longfellow’s in Song of Hiawatha, which centers around Lake Superior, known in the poem as “Gitche Gumee,” the “shining Big-Sea-Water.” Upham, Minnesota Geographic Names, 9; H. Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings, 157.
64. J. Clark, Ojibue Conquest, v.
65. Peyer, Tutor’d Mind, 269.
66. Copway’s presentation copy to Longfellow is in the Longfellow collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
67. “Hiawatha,” 3.
68. H. Longfellow, Letters, 4:109.
CHAPTER 7. Longfellow’s Pantheon
1. Emerson, Letters, 8:464.
2. Hawthorne and Dana, “Origin of Longfellow’s Evangeline.” Newton Arvin cites Hawthorne and Dana’s work as a monograph, but I have not yet found a copy of such a work.
3. Quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, “Origin of Longfellow’s Evangeline,” 174.
4. R. Kendrick, “Re-Membering America.” Hawthorne and Dana enumerate approximately 130 translations of Evangeline by 1947; see “Origin of Longfellow’s Evangeline,” 201. On the importance of Evangeline in South American literary circles, see Silva-Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture, 87–100.
5. I take this phrase from Tarlinskaja and Oganesova, “Meter and Meaning.”
6. Hoeltje, “Hawthorne’s Review of Evangeline.”
7. Arvin, Longfellow, 113.
8. Ibid., 101.
9. Lowell, Poetical Works, 142.
10. For a discussion of “epic deferral,” see n. 19 in chap. 5.
11. Arvin, Longfellow, 105–6.
12. For a further discussion of Turner’s “Epic Pastoral,” see chap. 3.
13. H. Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings; further citations of Longfellow’s poems will be given parenthetically, referring to this text unless otherwise noted.
14. The editor’s note in Poems and Other Writings quotes and translates Longfellow’s journal entry concerning the source, which is also found in S. Longfellow, ed., Life of Longfellow, 2:24. The translation of the French is based on the editor’s note.
15. See Jameson, Fables, 62–80; C. Kendrick, Milton.
16. For an excellent reading of the mythic quality of landscape in Evangeline, see Seelye, “Attic Shape.”
17. S. Longfellow, Life of Longfellow, 2:243, 238, 247–48.
18. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 204.
19. Robert Fitzgerald translates the Homeric epithet for Odysseus’s servant Eumaios as “O my swineherd!”
20. H. Longfellow, “Defence of Poetry,” 59.
21. Robert Ferguson and William Charvat have both given valuable renderings of Longfellow as a public writer. See Ferguson, “Longfellow’s Political Fears”; Charvat, Profession of Authorship.
22. See Ferguson, “Longfellow’s Political Fears.”
23. S. Longfellow, Life of Longfellow, 2:366.
24. V. Jackson, “Longfellow’s Tradition.”
25. Arvin, Longfellow, 166; Tichi, “Longfellow’s Motives,” 553.
26. Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World, 347. Alan Trachtenberg quotes Brotherston in his own reading of Hiawatha in Shades of Hiawatha, 85.
27. Wagenknecht, Longfellow, 295.
28. The European Catholic identity of the missionaries also works against many critics’ accusation that Longfellow was arguing for Anglo-Saxon racial superiority.
29. Freiligrath, “Vorwort des uebersetzers,” xi. I am grateful to Steffi Dippold for her invaluable assistance in the translation from the German; all quotations from this text are my translations.
30. Ibid., xii.
31. See Moyne, Hiawath and Kalevala.
32. For an anthropological account of the evolution of this canto, see T. DuBois, “From Maria to Marjatta.”
33. Freiligrath, “Vorwort des uebersetzers,” x, xii.
34. For an account of Mary Longfellow’s death and its effect on Longfellow, see Calhoun, Longfellow, 114–18.
35. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 587.
36. S. Longfellow, Life of Longfellow, 1:388–89.
37. Ibid., 2:151–52.
38. Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, 85. The Longfellows would have been reading from the first edition, which had just been released in 1849.
39. H. Longfellow, Christus: A Mystery, 471; further citations will be given parenthetically.
40. Hedge’s version was originally published in Gems of German Verse (1852) and in Hymns for the Church of Christ (1853), the latter of which he coedited and saw several reprintings of during his lifetime, though it is unclear when his translation became the “standard” American version of the hymn. On criticism of the hymn, see Arvin, Longfellow, 267.
41. Hedge and Huntington, eds., Hymns, 620.
42. Arvin, Longfellow, 277.
43. Buell, ed., Selected Poems, xxi; Howells, “Art of Longfellow,” 483.
44. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 256.
CHAPTER 8. Melville’s Epic Career
1. Quoted in Olsen-Smith and Marnon, “Melville’s Marginalia,” 86.
2. Thorp, “Herman Melville’s Silent Years.”
3. See Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings; E. Dryden, Monumental Melville; Parker, Making of a Poet.
4. Arac, Commissioned Spirits, 7, 2.
5. On Melville’s reading of John Quincy Adams’s Dermot Mac Morrogh (1834), see Parker, Making of a Poet, 148–49.
6. Foster, “Historical Note,” 662.
7. Melville, Mardi, 591. Future references to Mardi will be given parenthetically.
8. Compare H. Longfellow’s statement in his “Defence of Poetry,” 59: “With us, the spirit of the age is clamorous for utility,—for visible, tangible utility,—for bare, brawny, muscular utility. We would be roused to action by the voice of the populace, and the sounds of the crowded mart, and not ‘lulled asleep in shady idleness with poet’s pastimes.’ “Written almost twenty years before Mardi, and by a forceful young writer in his twenties, Longfellow’s article addresses a literary marketplace that had not yet supported a professional poet in the United States; by the time Melville wrote his parable of Lombardo, the poet’s status had changed from one of market exclusion to one of the prospect of market inclusion—at the likely expense of artistic independence. For more on Longfellow’s remarkably successful engagement with the literary market of his day, see Charvat, Profession of Authorship, 106–54.
9. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 525.
10. See Dimock, Empire for Liberty.
11. Melville, Correspondence, 191.
12. Melville, Moby-Dick, 449. Further references will be given parenthetically.
13. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 448.
14. Hayford, Melville’s Prisoners, 69.
15. Ovid makes a similarly equivocal gesture at the beginning of the Metamorphoses when he eschews the “I sing” of Homer and Virgil for the infinitive “to tell” or “to relate” (dicere), as discussed in the prologue.
16. Franklin, Wake of the Gods, 64.
17. Buell, “Moby-Dick as Sacred Text,” 62.
18. Sheldon, “Milton in Moby-Dick,” 40–46.
19. The line numbers are taken from the Oxford World Classics edition of Ovid, Metamorphoses, 49–51.
20. Allison, “Similies in Moby-Dick,” 14–15, 12. As Allison has pointed out, two major functions of the Homeric simile (via Milton) are vital to Melville’s technique in Moby-Dick: the figure creates a space for tangential or startling comparisons, and it provides a vehicle for developing unity through thematic repetition; see 13–14.
21. Douglas J. Robillard has written the most extensive analysis of ekphrasis in Redburn; see Robillard, Ionian Form, Venetian Tint, 47–69. See also his discussion of Moby-Dick at 70–98, to which this section is greatly indebted.
22. Wolf, “Moby-Dick and the Sublime,” 141.
23. Melville, Redburn, 7–9.
24. Melville, Correspondence, 191.
25. Melville, Mardi, 595; Parker, “Historical Note,” 315; Thorp, “Historical Note,” 404.
26. Wallace, Melville and Turner, 324.
27. See the discussion of Achilles’s shield in chap. 2.
28. Wolf, “Moby-Dick and the Sublime,” 143, 144.
29. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 9.
30. Robillard, Ionian Form, Venetian Tint, 80–82.
31. The best reading of “The Doubloon” as ekphrasis is by a classicist; see Garrison, “Melville’s Doubloon.”
32. The eight-escudo piece that matches Ishmael’s description was minted in Ecuador from 1838 to the early 1840s. See Ortuño, Historia Numismática del Ecuador.
33. A book that competed with Eckfeldt and Du Bois’s Manual, The Coins of the World, published by Matthew T. Miller in 1849, showed only the obverse (the missing side in Moby-Dick) in an engraving, and gave a description of the reverse far too short to have been useful to Melville.
34. Matt. 26:34b (AV).
35. See Garrison, “Melville’s Doubloon,” 179–80.
36. See Adler, War in Melville’s Imagination, 60–61; Ellis, “Engendering Melville,” 74.
37. For a detailed narrative of Melville’s preparation for his post-1860 epic, see Parker, Melville: A Biography, 2:428–53.
38. Quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, 527.
39. Emerson and Carlyle, Correspondence, 542.
40. Melville, Published Poems, 3; further citations will be given parenthetically.
41. Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, 484.
42. Worden was in fact blinded by an explosion during the battle; see the note in H. Cohen, ed., Battle-Pieces, 224.
43. Hsu, “War, Ekphrasis,” 61.
44. Melville had seen Turner’s canvas in the National Gallery in May 1857, a few days before setting sail for home after his voyage to the Holy Land that would provide the material for Clarel. He mentions it in his journal as “The Fighting——taken to her last birth.” Melville, Journals, 128. In a note to his poem, Melville eulogizes the ship, “the subject of the well-known painting by Turner”; with wry irony, he declares that the loss of the Temeraire “is lamented by none more than by regularly educated navy officers, and of all nations” (Published Poems, 174)—Melville not included among them, although perhaps the aesthetically minded Dupont is.
45. Whitman, Leaves, 709.
46. Vendler, “Melville,” 256.
47. Aaron, Unwritten War, xiii. The phrase “No sleep” is an allusion to the story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba in 2 Sam. 11 (AV), which begins, “And it came to pass in an evening-tide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house” (11:2).
48. See Potter, Melville’s Clarel; Obenzinger, American Palestine; Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism; Kenny, Herman Melville’s Clarel.
49. Walter Bezanson has posited that Melville knew of the Ramayana through William Rounsville Alger’s The Poetry of the East (1856), which included a prose synopsis of the story and a translated fragment; see Melville, Clarel, 750.
50. Melville, Clarel, 17; further citations will be given parenthetically.
51. Short, “Form as Vision.”
52. H. Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings, 482.
53. Cannon, “On Translating Clarel.”
54. Melville, Selected Poems, 296; further citations will be given parenthetically.
EPILOGUE. Invisible Epic
1. Hershel Parker has recently argued that
the phrase “the great American novel” … pre-dates by a decade or so the time when working critics stopped looking for great American literature to come in the form of an epic poem. Throughout the 1860s and even the early 1870s (when Melville was writing Clarel), the status of poetry, especially epic poetry, remained high. At some yet-to-be-established point toward the end of Melville’s life, perhaps before the 1870s were over, a majority of influential critics ceased looking for great new literary works to come in the form of the long poem and began looking for such a great work to come as prose fiction. (Parker, Making of a Poet, 103)
2. Quoted in Parker and Hayford, eds., Moby-Dick, 609, 617.
3. Higgins and Parker, eds., Critical Essays, 99, 102, 110.
4. Ibid., 113.
5. McWilliams, American Epic, 241–42.
6. See Dinerstein, “Technology and Its Discontents,” 570.
7. On the history of the publication of Picturesque America, see Rainey, Creating Picturesque America.
8. Bryant, ed., Picturesque America, 2:565–66, 576.
9. The cyclorama has been restored and is now on display at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania. On the history of the cyclorama, see Oettermann, Panorama, 343–44.
10. See Stewart, On Longing, 37–103.
11. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Nostalgia.” 3rd ed. 0-www.oed.com.libcat.lafayette.edu/.
12. On the history of the production of Huston’s Red Badge of Courage, see Ka-minsky, John Huston; DeBona, “Masculinity on the Front.” Lillian Ross’s Picture, based on a series of New Yorker pieces she wrote while covering the production, is one of the first books published on the making of a film and is still considered a classic of film journalism, despite its bias against the studio.
13. Huston, dir., Red Badge of Courage.
14. See Burke, “Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman”; Baker, “Failed Prophet”; Nadel, “Integrated Literary Tradition”; Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography.
15. Ellison, Collected Essays, 302–9, 185.
16. Cartwright, Reading Africa, 60–67.
17. Ibid., 60.
18. R. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3; further citations will be given parenthetically.
19. Didion, Foreword to Course of Empire, n.p.
20. Buchloh, “Curse of Empire,” 254.
21. “Editorial.”
22. Quoted in De Salvo and Norden, “Course of Empire,” n.p.
23. I have only been able to find one US exhibition of the series, by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in November 2005–January 2006; two of the five paintings have been given to the Whitney, so it is unlikely that another full series exhibition will be offered in the near future. Critic John Haber noted that Cole’s Course of Empire was on display at the New-York Historical Society, just across Central Park, at the same time as the Whitney exhibition. “Whitney Acquires Two Ruscha Paintings,” Artinfo.com, last updated November 18, 2005, www.artinfo.com/news/story/1607/whitney-acquires-two-ruscha-paintings/; Whitney Museum, “Press Release: Whitney in Association with Harvard University Art Museums to Present Ed Ruscha’s Course of Empire, Which Represented the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennale,” last accessed June 26, 2011, www.whitney.org/file_columns/0000/2589/november_2005.pdf; John Haber, “Imperious Criteria,” Haber’s Art Reviews, last accessed February 21, 2011, www.haberarts.com/empire.htm.
24. Cornell, Average Landscapes.
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