INTRODUCTION
Epic Travels
The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions.
—HENRY D. THOREAU, “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.”
They blunder who think tradition can be handed down unconflicted, uncontested, monological.
—DONALD G. MARSHALL, The Force of Tradition
“Ocian in view! O! the joy.”1 These words by Captain William Clark recorded the Corps of Discovery’s sighting of the Pacific Ocean from the Coastal Range west of what is now Portland, Oregon, on November 7, 1805. From this most tangible of Miltonic mounts of vision, Clark and his co-commander, Meriwether Lewis, beheld with their party America’s destiny in the latest rotation of the translatio imperii that had moved the course of empire westward from Troy to Rome in Virgil’s Aeneid. Such an inspiring, pregnant moment may be described as epic, as indeed it has. Frank Bergon has pointed to “epic” as “a word frequently and loosely applied to the expedition itself—the historic act of exploration—with respect to its magnitude, but the term might also characterize the journals as literary texts.”2 Albert Furtwangler uses a similar observation of the word’s frequent application to Lewis and Clark’s journey to distinguish between the adjectival sense of epic—Bergon’s “magnitude” sense, which Furtwangler says has been “beaten to death in advertising blurbs”—and the nominal sense, which he claims “still has some meaning left.” After wrestling with the journals’ lack of narrative unity, the perpetual need for that unity on the part of readers, and the maelstrom of “themes at the heart of American history” that have been isolated and recombined in various editions and studies of the journals, he concedes that the sketchy notebooks “do not fit this genre at all,” but still “in the story they tell, the achievements they record, and even the minute details of their composition they repeat epic impulses toward grandeur and integrative comprehension.”3 This strange dynamic, the impossibility of meeting the demands of form and the irresistible gravitational pull of form, is the central drama presented by this study.
Lewis and Clark’s journals are a fitting point of departure for a number of reasons. First, few texts have received the description “epic” as frequently in American letters as the journals. Elliott Coues in his 1893 edition declared, “The story of this adventure stands easily first and alone. This is our national epic of exploration, conceived by Thomas Jefferson, wrought out by Lewis and Clark, and given to the world by Nicholas Biddle.”4 Coues’s words would echo for the next century, but not always in the way that he said them. The word “this” at the start of the second sentence could mean the adventure, but grammatically it seems to mean the story, the textual version of the Corps of Discovery’s expedition. The actors Jefferson, Lewis, Clark, and Biddle (the editor of the journals’ first authorized edition in 1814) further complicate matters: did Jefferson conceive the text, or merely what it represents? Could Biddle have given the expedition, rather than the text, to the world? Most authors have since cut this knot by favoring the more striking interpretation, as one historian did in 1915 by identifying the expedition itself as having been “well called ‘our national epic of exploration.’ “5 Bergon acknowledges this reading as the common usage, as he feels the need to introduce his application of “epic” to the texts with a “but.” This slippage has fueled the powerful mythmaking associated with what now amounts to a Lewis-and-Clark industry that Furtwangler archly says “has its own epic dimensions.”6 And the territory of “epic” itself continually expands in the telling. This expansiveness of the concept allowed Thomas Carlyle to call Emerson’s epistolary description of Missouri epic, and Gettysburg veteran William McMichael to do the same for Peter Rothermel’s monumental painting of Pickett’s Charge. This slippage in its nineteenth-century context signals at once the apotheosis of poetry and its departure from public life. If the West or a battle can be not just poetic but epic, poets themselves are at best late to the scene and at worst will need to find other employment. But what may seem to be a word’s march toward meaninglessness is in fact a linguistic evolution that reflects how widely and deeply ideas about epic and national identity have worked into American culture. From the late seventeenth century, virtually all English dictionaries (including Johnson’s and Webster’s) have defined epic largely as an adjective. To the extent that the dictionaries recorded actual usage of the word, “epic” as a concept seems to have behaved more as a mode than as a genre; the expansiveness of the adjectival gave epic a penchant for acquiring new resonances and referents.
Epic was about origins. Epic was about higher principles. Epic was about history. Epic was about community. Epic has been the first term in narratives of modernity stretching from Schiller and the Schlegels to Lukács and Bakhtin (and, to a lesser extent, Benjamin). In a sense, the project of critical theory in its modern form arises from the sense of belatedness created by reading Homer and Virgil. The fact is that epic as a concept has weathered many previous death sentences. Herbert F. Tucker has recently reminded us, as he quotes Oscar Wilde reminding his contemporaries over a century earlier, that the demise of epic in modernity was an idea that troubled the Greek-speaking Alexandrian poets, a school that Virgil would learn from as he formed his own poetic project.7 Epic is more talismanic now than it was for Aristotle, as writers’ fears for the meaning of modernity have focused much more on the demise of epic than on tragedy, the form that Aristotle actually favored. German critics in the late eighteenth century argued that epic must necessarily give way to tragedy as the world of action was replaced by the world of thought in the modern age; Hamlet is more compelling to moderns than Achilles, as astonishing as the latter may be. Nevertheless, epic-as-adjective has still allowed us to name, organize, and choose between cultural values ever since: that Lewis and Clark’s journey or journals can be called “epic” speaks to the importance and excellence ascribed to them by the callers. And those values never exist in a historical vacuum.
When Elliott Coues called the journals (or journey) an epic, he was adapting a discourse already some fifty years old. The first “epicizing” of Lewis and Clark was in an anonymous 1866 article on Oregon and the Washington territory in Beadle’s Monthly. There the journey (not the journals) was declared “an epic of exploration—a modern Argonautic expedition in pursuit of the Golden Fleece of the future.” The comparison with Jason and the Argonauts, one that Jefferson had used half-seriously to characterize his own generation in the eyes of his grandchildren, continued: “The little band were scouts of the grand army for the conquest of a hemisphere—the army of civilization and freedom.” The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny is clear, but no less so in 1866 was the Unionism embodied in the reference to the “grand army,” echoing the Grand Army of the Republic, the newly formed association of Union veterans. The vision of Lewis and Clark as epic served to legitimate the impossible vision of continental union after a bloody civil war. The article’s closing paragraph recasts Clark’s effusion at the sight of the Pacific as the end of a grand political journey: “I never felt the magnitude of our Union until in Washington Territory, forty-four hundred miles from home, I found not only the same language, but the same currency, the same flag, the same hopes, and fears, and sympathies, and precious memories which are cherished at other extremities of the vast continent.”8 The curious blend at the end of this sentence strives to create a newly reimagined community of the United States, but it also connects back to projecting civilization and freedom onto a mission of “conquest” that Jefferson had carefully described in his official papers as a “literary pursuit,” in order to avoid the political ramifications of conquest in the hotly contested territory of North America in the early 1800s.9 Characterizing that literary pursuit as epic helped to make such useful conflations rhetorically viable.
Even the Beadle’s instance had its own prehistory. After Meriwether Lewis’s death in 1809, Jefferson appointed Nicholas Biddle to complete an authorized edition to combat the spurious editions that had already been appearing for years. Biddle worked at the project until 1814, when he suddenly delegated it to Paul Allen, the man whose name appears on the authorized edition. Though nothing in the organization of the journals themselves suggested the format, the 1814 edition was divided into twelve sections, the same number as the sections of Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Though neither Biddle nor Allen (nor apparently anyone else) remarked on the association, the form set the precedent for later editions of the journals, until Frank Bergon in 1997 remarked that he had organized his Penguin edition “into the paradigmatic twelve-book epic scheme.”10 Whether or not Biddle or his contemporaries consciously considered the 1814 edition an epic, future readers—particularly post–Civil War readers searching for national origins untainted by the conflict—would find the suggestion irresistible.11 Epic did not die with Milton; as this study will show, it developed new power and shape in the United States that continues to influence our literature and our culture today.
Toward a History of American Epic
Epic is traditionally held in modern thought as the most canonical of genres, and yet the paradox is that most (though not all) of the texts that I treat in this book have received little or no previous scholarly attention. This is then in one sense a recovery project, but it moves beyond recovery to aim for a new synthesis, a way of incorporating both the canon and the apocrypha of American literature through historicizing the very notion of canonicity within the context of epic. In this, I follow the recent work of Edward Whitley, who in his American Bards brilliantly posits a quasi-Bakhtinian “abundance model for literary history,” in which the object of study in literary history is not a canon (with or without supporting, “lesser” texts) but “a proliferation of texts and authors as succeeding generations of scholars and teachers redefine literary history with an expanding corpus of texts.” The metaphors that Whitley uses of “layers of sediment” and “the traces of a palimpsest” for theorizing the place of authors in such a model are valuable for their ecological sensibility, reframing literary history as both phenomenon and environment.12
My own preferred metaphor (if I may call it such) of a tradition highlights the role of human choice and cultural influence, perhaps the reverse-angle version of Whitley’s proposal. This interplay of natural given and human organization lies at the heart of one of the most influential nineteenth-century intellectual projects, Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos, which Laura Dassow Walls has recently restored to the center of American literary discourse in her Passage to Cosmos. Such a project, as Humboldt’s Cosmos would suggest, requires a focus beyond the range of the nation, and while this book emphasizes British America and the territory of the United States, I am indebted to the recent comparative work of scholars both prominent and little known in this country, from Kirsten Silva-Gruesz to Armin Paul Frank and Kurt Mueller-Vollmer.13 Epic often ends up resisting the nation, as much as the form has been enlisted to celebrate the identity and history of many nations over the course of its history.14 In writing what is in many respects a national history, then, I have repeatedly moved across the temporal and geographical boundaries of the United States in order to better understand how such an international form as the epic could be expected to make national meaning in a given historical moment. The structure of much of my argument is in fact philological, focusing on the changing meanings of “epic” as a term as it travels from poetry to law, to art criticism, and eventually into the realm of cultural work more generally, as definitions expand and anxieties about the place of the canon in modern life become more vexed throughout the timeline of this book.
While I make no claims to comprehensiveness in this volume, I do embrace a long chronology—roughly 1700 to 1876, with brief forays off either end of the timeline—as well as a wide sense of what counts as American, including not only Homer, Virgil, and Milton in discussions of works by American-born authors but also American translations, transatlantic correspondence, and works received more enthusiastically abroad than at home. Then there is the matter of what an epic is. I have lost count of the number of times someone has asked me in recent years, “What is an epic?” That question usually strikes me as somehow reminiscent of Pontius Pilate asking Christ, “What is truth?” in St. John’s Passion narrative. Yet rather than respond out of presumed omniscience, or with the silence that Christ returns in answer, I have looked for intelligent ways to paraphrase Augustine’s reflection on time in his Confessions: “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.”15 But this does not amount to a default into literary agnosticism. Rather than work from a definition of what epic is, or was, I undertake to historicize it throughout my chronology in order to show the different work that epics have done in American history, the different forms that epics have taken, and the new insights into literary and cultural history that emerge once synchronic, monolithic definitions of form are abandoned—the surprises in the archive of American literary engagements with epic form are myriad.
But we can never abandon theory altogether. Franco Moretti expresses the paradox of literary history quite well: “We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, to know.”16 But the creative tension between conceptual knowledge and archival richness must remain dynamic if literary history is to provide a meaningful basis for generating and supporting further scholarship. At their purest, concepts become so weak that they prove useless to us, and we thus find ourselves returning to what Wittgenstein called “the rough ground”—in literary studies, that means we return to the archive. But what are we looking for when we make that return? Do poems in cantos or books always qualify (as at least one bibliographer chooses to assume)?17 Do we scour catalogs and databases for titles with words ending in “-iad”? Or look for specific conventions, such as single combats, invocations, or extended similes? All these have played a role in my research, as I suspect they have for previous scholars of the form such as John McWilliams and Herbert Tucker. But even once we find such works, what is to be included in a history of American epic? My working model has been that of a tradition, a term that I use interchangeably with genre throughout this study. While I discuss at length what I mean by tradition and how I see that concept at work in literary history in the next section, to explain the problems and the stakes of this study, I will say here that to write an epic, or to engage with epic via other genres, is to place oneself in a genealogy dominated by central ancestral figures, primarily Homer, Virgil, and Milton, in this case. With this set of parameters in mind, I look at a wide range of texts, in literature but also in other discursive arenas such as art and law, in order to conduct a thought experiment: to place epic in the center of American literary and cultural history, and to consider how such a placement leads us to rethink key narratives of those histories.
One narrative that this study argues against is what Alfred Kazin called the “American procession” to modernism.18 At one level, this argument has little novelty in it. Since around 1990, a growing body of scholarship in what is now referred to as the field of historical poetics has brought both historicist and formalist modes of analysis to bear on the huge amounts of poetry written prior to the twentieth century (primarily the two centuries prior) in an effort to recover practices and ideologies of reading, writing, performing, and consuming poetry in a range of social contexts and forms.19 These studies have laid bare the tautologies of New Critical notions that “identify poetry as lyric,” “the lyric as the literary,” and “the literary as what they [professors] want to teach the student in turn to identify in poetry.”20 The idea that poetry is to be read as lyric poetry, and that poetry is in fact lyric, had rhetorical power in justifying the study of literature as an independent field of inquiry, but it also sequestered poetry to such an extent that by the time the likes of Richard Chase, R. W. B. Lewis, and F. O. Matthiessen were writing their monumental studies of American literature, American poetry was no longer American literature.21 The elevation of Whitman and Dickinson—both innovators of lyric forms and self-identified as marginal to American society—as the two great pre-1900 poets only served to consolidate this ghettoization of genre. To describe things so politically is apt for historical poetics, as scholars have recovered discourses of sentimentalism, mourning, memorization, and imitation, ways of writing and thinking that dominated pre-1900 poetry but that had been excluded from modernist and New Critical notions of literary genius. Along these lines, the present study aims to correct the assumption that pre-modernist literature, at its best, had modernism unconsciously in mind by examining extended, narrative forms of poetry and looking at those forms in relationship to other kinds of writing in their historical moments.
The more important narrative that I seek to revise in this study follows from the first. The focus on both modernist aesthetics and prose literature was bolstered after the rise of theory by two influential studies: Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel and Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s “Epic to Novel.” Both theorists offered powerful new ways of thinking about the novel’s relationship to modernity, but they also were taken by many scholars, especially Americanists, as useful narratives for understanding literary history, a purpose arguably distinct from what both Lukács and Bakhtin had aimed to do. This narrative is about the triumph of modern prose over ancient poetry, often linked to pairings such as orality/literacy, script/print, and rural/urban. While historians of both European poetry and the novel have attacked this narrative repeatedly, even pointing to the reputation of Homer’s Odyssey as the forerunner of romance or novel traditions, the epic-to-novel teleology still continues to appear uncontested in works ranging from Edward Mendelson’s work on encyclopedic narrative to Wai Chee Dimock’s recent reading of Henry James as a Lukácsian “pre-national.”22 For the period that this study covers, the only prior book on the subject, John McWilliams’s 1989 The American Epic, includes an epigraph from Lukács, and while McWilliams highlights that theorist’s rejection of verse as a necessary criterion for epic, he accepts the epic-to-novel telos as describing the development of American literature, pointing to the unpopularity and poor quality (from an updated New Critical standpoint) of early US epic poems as a sure sign that the form was dying out and to the success of mock-epic forms and large-scale novels such as Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans as evidence that the novel did in fact inherit the epic’s mantle in the New World as well as the Old.
Yet one of the great strengths of McWilliams’s study is how he shows that through the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, Americans expected an epic poem to be the benchmark of national literary achievement, and no shortage of candidates were celebrated as reaching that benchmark, just as so many novels since the late nineteenth century have vied for that postbellum title, the Great American Novel.23 The widespread production and consumption of mock-epic was not a sign that epic was dying out, for mock-epic only works among readers familiar with the conventions and claims of epic poetry. And in my research for this study, I have found, and am still finding, that Americans just would not stop writing epics—not out of nostalgia or from missing the memo that the epic was dead, but because the epic tradition continued to have relevance on a personal level, as well as in regional, national, and international contexts.
Nor was the novel necessarily the most important intergenre for the epic in America (if it indeed had been anywhere). As this study demonstrates, the generic acquisitiveness of epic brought it into contact with a wide range of intergenres, often several at once in a given text, resulting in mutually transformative interactions that indeed brought the epic and the novel into a line of descent together, as they did epic and closet drama, epic and elegy, epic and painting, and epic and constitution, to name a few of the more central pairings that appear in these pages. The language of painting appeared in works by men and women, in long forms and short, in poetry and prose, in order to convey what it was that the author was doing by engaging with Homer and company; in turn, epic became a canon-making term in art criticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as part of the emerging discourse of the professional artist. The expansive sweep of the encyclopedia influenced the departure from narrative evidenced in works ranging from Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus (1787) to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), even as works such as Encyclopaedia Americana (1st ed., 1833) became key venues for theorizing the meaning of epic in modernity.
Most significantly, the preponderance of the elegiac in American epics helps to explain both the persistent relevance of epic poetry in the nineteenth-century United States and the epic poem’s fall from critical grace after 1900. Max Cavitch’s American Elegy convincingly presents the history of mourning poems in America as a dynamic interplay of popular culture, European poetics, and the psychological need to leave something behind in commemorating loss. Elegy was, as Cavitch argues, likely the most prevalent poetic form in American literature, practiced by parents, children, slaves, and professional writers alike. Epic, by far the more elite of the two genres, was historically reserved for learned men as authors, and only men and women of a certain level of cultural attainment as readers. While this cultural hierarchy continued to hold by and large in the American literary scene, writers such as the young slave Phillis Wheatley, the Quaker schoolteacher Richard Snowden, and the sanitarium inmate Richard Nesbit all wrote epic poems, and for such writers as well as others as elite as Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau, their entry into epic authorship was often through elegy. As will be shown in many of the chapters of this study, the language of mourning served to import the discourse of sentimentalism into epic beginning in the eighteenth century, a development that would make the classical form more accessible to modern readers and allow for writers including Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to reach their readers through ambitious poems meant to create a national mythology. The blending of epic and elegy is in fact endemic to the former genre; without mourning the fallen hero, there would be no kleos, no glory for Achilles or Hector or Odysseus. Sheila Murnaghan has argued that the particularity and occasionality of lament lead to reassessing epic, a “monumental” genre generally perceived as “a massive, univocal, and celebratory form of high art,” as dependent “on the ‘speech genres’ of ordinary communal life,” thus highlighting its “dialogic, polyvocal dimensions.”24 Distinguishing between male lament, which leads to kleos (Achilles mourns Patroklus), and female lament, which promises no redemption for the hero since his community is doomed (Andromache mourns Hector), Murnaghan suggests that the source and extent of the elegiac infusion into epic may in fact undo the classical logic of heroism and monumentalizing that the form is expected to perform.
Something similar is going on in most, if not all, of the works studied in this volume, as Joshua and his men cannot cease mourning their fallen countrymen in Timothy Dwight’s The Conquest of Canäan (1785); Hiawatha weeps over his dead wife, Minnehaha, at the start of his own exit from the story in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855); and Richard Snowden’s speaker breaks off his epic vision of American prosperity by calling for an elegist to retell his story at the end of The Columbiad (1795). This persistence of lament threatens the epideictic thrust of the Homeric form, and the result is that many of these texts have been branded in the twentieth century as sentimental failures—particularly Dwight’s and Longfellow’s poems. For better or for worse, the discourse of sentimentalism had associated most elegy by the mid-nineteenth century with the “graveyard school” poets, typified by Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country ChurchYard” and Edward Young’s “Night-Thoughts,” and later including what we might call the “cemetery school” poets, such as Sigourney, Longfellow, and Alice and Phoebe Cary, who performed personal mourning in ways generalized enough to translate to individual experiences of real loss. I would argue that this association, more than any other, led to the falling stock of the epic poem during the rise of New Criticism. The politics of academic taste have kept the course of epic in America from receiving due attention.
This has been the case even in previous scholarship on the topic. McWilliams performs the expected act of critical disdain for these cemetery poets in his summary of antebellum epic: “The disgrace of the imitative verse epic [in the early Republic] led authors to portray American heroic subjects in new literary forms more engaging to contemporary readers. If we mercifully except Hiawatha, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is still the one work commonly believed to have fulfilled this end.”25 While the problem of imitation was much more complicated, and perhaps less problematic, than McWilliams implies, my main point here is that his “merciful” exception of Hiawatha signals an anxiety that has haunted American studies since the early twentieth century. The idea that Longfellow, the most influential and commercially successful American poet of his own century, could have contributed to the development of American literature threatens the belief reiterated from F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance to John Carlos Rowe’s New American Studies: that American literature is about democratic experimentation, liberal cosmopolitanism, and revolutionary iconoclasm (Longfellow actually participated in all three of these, but in less Whitmanian modes). As Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued in Boredom: A Literary History, to find previously popular works (such as Richardson’s novels or Longfellow’s poetry) boring or tedious is not so much an aesthetic evaluation as it is an aggressive response to what the reader perceives to be a serious threat to his or her fundamental assumptions about the world. Rather than dismissing epics as boring, in the sense of inducing comas or suicidal thoughts, what if we came to see them as boring into the deepest, knottiest issues in American culture—of empire, of equality, of virtue, and of the place of the individual in a modern society?
The epic tradition resonated with American writers for several reasons. The ability to represent a nation both to itself and to the world made the epic a powerful diplomatic and cultural ally for writers such as Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow, who were themselves institutionally involved in the new nation’s intellectual and political development. The hope of these writers was that epic’s (more or less) recognizable form and ideology would make the monumental task of civic reeducation more feasible, while the form’s prestige would attract the greatest minds to step forward as the nation’s literary Founders, as the prestige of chartering a new nation had seemed to produce heroes organically out of the colonies. Combining encyclopedic reach with rigorous narrative subordination offered a literary solution to the formal problem of extending a federal republic across a vast geography and a quickly diversifying economy. However, this last advantage in particular carried with it an increased danger. By foregrounding the nation’s diversity for the purpose of subordinating that diversity to unity, America’s epicists left open the possibility that such subordination could only be incomplete, if not altogether a failure. Alex Woloch describes two wars taking place in the Iliad: one between the Greek alliance and the armies of Troy, the other between the heroes who dominate the story and the masses without whom the story (and the heroes) would not exist.26 Only through subordination, sometimes forcefully so, as in Odysseus’s beating of an upstart commoner in Iliad II, can the story proceed. And a similar violence of subordination runs through the American epic as well, whether in verse or prose. Daniel Webster forces down the atrocities of Indian removal, slavery, and “free” labor exploitation in his Achillean history of the nation; Dwight’s Joshua puts down a rebellion in order to complete his Conquest of Canäan; and Ishmael silences Starbuck’s acuity in order to leave Ahab’s monomania unimpeded to the end. The violence of the path to epic greatness led some American epicists, such as the pacifist Richard Snowden, to turn the form completely upside down, in an effort to produce a democratic epic—a subordinated insubordination, a contradiction in terms and a description of a literary project that continued through Reconstruction and has continued to influence American literature down to the present, as with works as diverse as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), and James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar (2009). This history has been obscured by tenacious aesthetic filters, and yet it is still playing itself out in the twenty-first century.
On Terms and Methods
Much of the most influential criticism on epic has been done in the field of comparative literature, and a brief discussion of recent developments in that field will help contextualize my own approach to epics and to genre. Epic has become especially important in recent years to theorists of world literature, and American texts have been part of that new work. Franco Moretti has helped to redefine partially the critical debate over epic away from Bakhtin’s and Lukács’s epic-to-novel paradigm; in Modern Epic, Moretti treats epic from Goethe’s Faust onward as a super-genre, specifically a phenomenon of what he calls a “world system” of encyclopedic literature in which a few great texts are written to both represent and create an entire world, while consciously seeking for themselves an international reader-ship.27 Melville’s Moby-Dick, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Pound’s Cantos appear in Moretti’s supergenre, alongside Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, Joyce’s Ulysses, and García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude. Working from a more nation-based starting point, Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents is a breakthrough in bringing American literature and world literature back into conversation, in considering genres as world systems and looking beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the nation-state to make sense of how literature is created and interpreted, but her heavy reliance on Lukács in dealing with epic makes it necessary to look for alternative theories of the form for us to understand what we find in the archive. In her essay “Genre as World-System,” Dimock does indeed offer two such alternatives: laws of fractal geometry and those of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” theory.28 Both of these kinds of “laws” are designed for talking about categories and phenomena that defy classification, and Wittgenstein in particular emphasizes the need for maintaining “soft” boundaries around certain concepts, such as games, for which “hard,” logically consistent boundaries are highly problematic. In this book I push Dimock’s genealogical methodology even further, for one of the fascinating but understudied elements of intertextuality is the author’s ability (at least to some extent) to choose his or her own intertexts and intergenres—Virgil, for example, chooses to combine the Iliad and the Odyssey through the two halves of his Aeneid, while Camões focuses on the Odyssey alone in the Lusiads, his narrative of Vasco de Gama’s voyage to India, with the addition of material from Iberian travel narratives. Particularly from Camões’s era (the late 1500s) forward, Western writers of epic became increasingly choosy about the texts that would dominate the epic tradition in which they participated.29 While unconscious, indirect connections certainly abound between texts, perhaps more in epics than in many other forms, the family resemblances that bind post-Renaissance epics together are to a considerable extent the result of chosen relations, or what I call a tradition.
Epic tradition has been a vehicle for anchored innovation from Virgil onward. With texts so prestigious and so complex, this is at one level a necessity. T. S. Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” argues that tradition in fact creates the meaning of a single work or author: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”30 Given this necessity, then, Eliot advocates a willful response to those dead predecessors. His image of the bookshelf that each poet rearranges, moving this writer next to that one, removing and adding books, is his view of how canons are formed, but I find it especially apt for thinking of how the canons behind individual works are formed, the literary equivalent of what Kenneth Burke calls “the Constitution-behind-the-Constitution.” Ralph Ellison has put this in even more striking terms in “The World and the Jug.” Responding to Irving Howe’s claim that Richard Wright had a crucial influence on Ellison’s work, the novelist retorted that Wright saw him as a “potential rival,” not as an apprentice. In a famous passage, Ellison explained how he understood his relationship to Wright among other writers he admired: “[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ‘ancestors.’ Wright was, in this sense, a ‘relative,’ Hemingway an ‘ancestor.’ Langston Hughes, whose work I knew in grade school and whom I knew before I knew Wright, was a ‘relative’; Eliot, whom I was to meet only many years later, and Malraux and Dostoevsky and Faulkner, were ‘ancestors’—if you please or don’t please!”31 Ellison mixes living and dead writers, countrymen and foreigners, in his notion of “ancestors.” Those ancestors do not exist in a prior canon (though many, such as Hemingway and Dostoevsky, had moved beyond their national canons by the 1960s, when Ellison responded to Howe) but are created by and for Ellison as a group. These are the writers in whose tradition he wants to write and be evaluated. The writers that are most obvious to connect with him—other African American writers of national or international stature—are important intertexts, but more for the cultural moment than for the author’s own goals.
In adopting this line of literary genealogizing, as it were, I tend to foreground authorial intention, though not without the usual caveats of indeterminacy and the reader’s role in making meaning. In a sense, my concept of how writers of epic choose their traditions—what I call the epic impulse—is a form of reading, with superlatively extensive annotation in the form of an “original” work. While Homer, Virgil, and Milton are the three consistent ancestors through this study, others stand alongside them, rise to their level, or fall away at various times. Tasso was considered more important than Milton by many eighteenth-century critics of epic, Dante was barely known in English-speaking countries before 1800, and Beowulf was not even available in print in Britain until the late 1820s. Thus, countenancing authorial intent is one way of keeping a historicized perspective on the canon; just because Gilgamesh or Beowulf came before Barlow’s Columbiad does not mean that the tears of Columbus are part of a tradition with the laments of Beowulf’s subjects. The Kalevala, while in one sense older than the many Renaissance epics Longfellow could have drawn on in choosing a model for Hiawatha, was attractive in the 1850s precisely because it was an ancient tradition that had only been available to outsiders for less than two decades. To speak of “the epic tradition” in this study is therefore valid, so long as the reader keeps in mind that it refers to specific traditions for specific writers and works—but is “the tradition” in that instance.
An example of how this kind of tradition-driven thinking manifests itself appears in Royalist poet William Davenant’s 1650 preface to his Gondibert: An Heroick Poem:
I will … begin with Homer, who though he seemes to me standing upon the Poets famous hill, like the eminent Sea-marke, by which they have in former ages steer’d; and though he ought not to be remov’d from that eminence, least Posterity should presumptuously mistake their course; yet some (sharply observing how his successors have proceeded no farther than a perfection of imitating him) say, that as Sea-markes are chiefly usefull to Coasters, and serve not those who have the ambition of Discoverers, that love to sayle in untry’d Seas; so he hath rather prov’d a Guide for those, whose satisfy’d witt will not venture beyond the track of others, then to them, who affect a new and remote way of thinking; who esteem it a deficiency and meanesse of minde, to stay and depend upon the authority of example.32
Davenant aimed to create a new heroic form of epic with his Gondibert, one free of the machinery and folklore that dominated Homer’s works and those of his imitators. However, Davenant’s choice of metaphor shows just how indebted his new concept is to a Homeric original. The “sea-marke,” a point on land visible from the sea, is both a navigational point of reference and a boundary: one may adjust a course based on relationship to the sea-marke, one may adjust that relationship by sailing closer to or farther from the mark, but one can never come straight at the sea-marke after a certain point—total destruction would be the only result. Thus, Davenant archly comments that Homer’s “successors have proceeded no farther” than the original; rather than accept the limitation, Davenant reverses the trajectory of his metaphor to make the sea-marke a point of departure, the edge of the known from which the “ambition of Discoverers” may set out in more flexible territory. But this kind of discovery is only that which is not-Homer; the new modern tradition that Davenant seeks to establish is possible precisely because Homer stands behind it. The English poet has chosen his genealogy for the purposes of declaring his independence from his forefather, but such a declaration only shows how closely the two are aligned.
Davenant’s placing himself within a tradition defined by both critical consensus and individual choice is at the heart of the epic impulse; as a concept, it is no mere rehearsal of Harold Bloom’s theory of weak and strong poets, but brings Bloom’s weak and strong poets back together by acknowledging their shared starting point, while it also historicizes and thus troubles Bloom’s distinction. What makes a strong poet, after all, if not the ambition of a discoverer ready to pass his predecessor’s boundary? Yet Davenant’s reputation as a poet is almost nonexistent today, and it is unclear whether that would have changed had he completed Gondibert. In the preface, Davenant announced his intention to finish the poem while serving as the new lieutenant governor of Maryland. This appointment was made by the exiled Charles II, however, and Davenant was captured by Cromwellians en route to America and held in the Tower of London. His reputation was such that Milton was one of several poets who personally petitioned Parliament for his release, but the poem was never finished, and it lay unpublished until after his death. Almost two centuries later, though, Davenant would become an ancestor when Herman Melville picked up a secondhand copy of his 1673 Works while on a trip to London and read it intently during the return voyage in 1850, when he began to write what would become Moby-Dick.
To put a finer point on how a prior work may be used in a tradition, let us turn to one more example, from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem certainly redefined the epic tradition in profound ways that would set some of the terms for Americans writing in that tradition, and much has been made of Milton as “an American poet”; the influence of Paradise Lost as a source text is well documented, both for American poetry and for political prose on both sides of the Revolutionary War. However, Milton’s epic included a major formal innovation that, while virtually all American epicists felt compelled to either accept or openly reject it, has gone unnoticed by Milton scholars. The last two books of Paradise Lost, which contain Adam’s vision of futurity with commentary by the archangel Michael, have sparked critical controversy for a century and more. The most famous of critical statements concerning these books is that by C. S. Lewis, who characterizes the books as “an untransmuted lump of futurity.”33 Milton’s style in these books certainly does differ from that of the first ten books, in the relatively bare narration and relentless forward drive of the story. But what interests me is not so much the debate over the stylistic merit of Books XI and XII as what the debate has bracketed: Adam’s vision continues not only up to Milton’s time but all the way to “the world’s great period,” the Second Coming of Christ and the foundation of the New Heaven and New Earth. This marks the first time in the history of epic visions of futurity—a device that Milton would have traced back to Homer—that the vision moves temporally beyond the author’s own era. If the great ekphrastic moment in an epic (such as Achilles’s shield) is a hermeneutic for the work itself, as has often been argued,34 then the vision of futurity provides an apology, or more precisely a teleology, for the work. In the Odyssey, this teleology belongs exclusively to the past, tied up in the life and death of Odysseus; in his prophecy at the edge of the underworld, Teiresias predicts only as far as the circumstances of the hero’s death. Virgil shifted the tense of his teleology in the Aeneid by projecting Anchises’s Elysian prophecy to Aeneas up to the death of Caesar Augustus’s son, Marcellus—the poet’s present. And in the poet’s present the teleology rested, in Camões and Ariosto and Tasso. The uneasy alliance between Christian eschatology and epic teleology resulted in the shift from present to eternity in Dante’s Divine Comedy and in the Redcrosse Knight’s similarly extra-chronological glimpse of the heavenly city in Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Yet the move from present to eternity did not change the inflection of the works; Dante’s and Spenser’s respective presents still dominate their texts. In Paradise Lost, a work similarly a product of its time, Milton seeks to transcend that time by inflecting his narrative into the future tense. Epic was no longer about its own present, but about its own future, and the long-debated flattening of Milton’s poetic voice in Books XI and XII would continue into Paradise Regained—and into American epic poetry. The mount of vision, by virtue of its association with the imperialist gaze of prospect poetry and its newly fashioned futurist telos in Milton’s epic, attracted American authors and critics alike. Milton had responded to his tradition, and Americans who took Milton as part of their tradition would offer dozens of responses to his mount of vision, from Barlow’s Vision of Columbus to Cooper’s mountain “The Vision” in The Pioneers to Mount Etna in Poe’s Eureka. The mount of vision became an homage to Milton, a familiar gesture that could be used to make arguments about the meaning of landscape, the trajectory of the nation, or even the nature of knowledge.
I will here insert a brief word about my own choosiness. I say very little about the mock-epic in this study, despite dozens of texts available from the period covered in this study. One reason for this silence is the high quality of the existing scholarship, notably McWilliams’s chapter on mock-epic in The American Epic and the work of Colin Wells, David S. Shields, and William C. Dowling on early American mock-epic.35 Another reason is that mock-epic, like the literary historians with whom I take issue above, is centrally concerned with the failure of “high epic” in the face of modernity. From the quasi-Homeric “Battle of Frogs and Mice” onward, mock-epic as a form has assumed that epic takes a fundamental form (almost always based on the Iliad) and that the state of things today is so far removed from the high rhetoric and heroism of what the epic presents that the force of the new mock-epic is in pointing out that distance. While, as I show with authors such as Thoreau and Melville, mock-epic was a key element in the continual fluidity of epic as a tradition in the United States, the inherent conservatism of the form led me to de-emphasize it in my account. Another lacuna in this study is war poetry. Though poems about the Revolution and Indian wars are discussed here, many others are not, and poems dealing with the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and several other historical conflicts are largely bracketed. This is primarily because, as I argue in chapter 1, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are the paramount springboards for innovation in American epic poetry. While many American epic poems imitate the Iliad, versions of the Odyssey and Milton’s epics tend to prevail not only in numbers but also in cultural influence and engagement. The phenomenon of the American war poem is itself a fascinating subject and is worthy of further scholarship; I here set it aside to allow for concentration on other, more surprising engagements with epic, which I hope will lead others to reassess the place of the Iliad tradition in American literature. As I have found in my research, there are many different kinds of epics in the archive, and they often blend into each other. I have tried to select a few kinds that I have found most interesting to study and that I hope will be useful to others to read about as well.
In order to do so, I have faced the problem (a formal problem that any epic work must solve as well) of balancing the macro and the micro. New possibilities for studying the macro have made this end of the analysis especially attractive. Moretti’s recent work, such as his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, itself enacts a kind of epic, not unlike the Miltonic mount of vision in its attempt to make sense of global history through geographic distance: “[L]iterary history will quickly become very different from what it is now: it will become ‘second hand’: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading. Still ambitious, and actually even more so than before (world literature!); but the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be.”36 Moretti’s vision of distant reading owes something to the aesthetics of the Grand Manner, or what Sir Joshua Reynolds called “the epic style” in his Discourses, a work that is discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Yet this distance comes with a price, as David Damrosch has observed in his assessment of Moretti’s vision; Damrosch advocates retaining close reading as a tool for constructing case studies out of the immense sweep of the Morettian project.37 Dimock has also voiced a critique of “distant reading,” in which she objects to Moretti’s emphasis on universal laws in his methodology.38
Although I do provide some overview of the development of epic forms in English-speaking America, particularly in chapters 1 and 4, my primary mode of analysis is close reading, a commitment this study shares with works such as Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery and Cavitch’s American Elegy. While seeking to move away from treating all poetry as lyric poetry, I find that close attention to the language of key moments in epic works helps to highlight not only the presence of lyric qualities in epic writing (and in twentieth-century reading of epics) but also the value of holding the richness of poetic language and the extension of narrative in tension with each other. In taking on this challenge, I begin with a brief, admittedly idiosyncratic sampling of individual responses to epic; I then proceed with a thematic survey of major innovations in epic form in eighteenth-century writing, followed by an analysis of epic’s expansion into other cultural arenas, particularly constitutional law and painting, before examining the changes in thinking about epic during the heyday of transcendentalism and the rise of German-influenced humanities study at Harvard. These studies lay the foundation for closer examination of individual authors, both for their own sake and for illuminating larger cultural functions of epic: the epic-novel relationship in Cooper, the persistence and prestige of “Indian epic” poems in the career of Sigourney, Longfellow’s commitment to translation and the Americanizing of Weltliteratur, and Melville’s lifelong reflections on the meaning of authorial career in the age of professionalization. The study concludes with a brief look at the migration of epic from literary to broader aesthetic discourses, which pave the way for its inclusion in film and contemporary art.
IN HIS ESSAY “THE STORYTELLER,” Walter Benjamin revises Lukács’s epic-to-novel narrative with a third term; Benjamin sees both epic and novel as endangered by the rise of information.39 As more events are pre-explained to people in the form of news media, the work of bringing meaning to events is displaced, and events therefore cannot be as resonantly meaningful in the modern present as they could when distances of place and time obviated the need for accuracy. What might be called the crisis of realism in epic form—the problem of making a larger-than-life story or persona widely believable—haunted American engagements with epic from its earliest stages. Lewis and Clark have not been immune to this problem. Clark’s line that opens this introduction was not in the Biddle-Allen 1814 edition. It was not even in Frank Bergon’s edition. Not until the publication of Gary E. Moulton’s The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery, the 2003 abridgment (in twelve chapters, of course) of Moulton’s monumental thirteen-volume complete edition of the journals, did an abridged collection include the line. The reason is that Clark did not write it in his journal, but in “a separate list” that Moulton had compiled as part of the supporting documentation. As many commentators have also pointed out, the Corps of Discovery did not in fact see the Pacific that day, but only the estuary bay of the Columbia River. The Miltonic mount of vision in the Coastal Range of Oregon fell prey to the epistemological limits of actual human eyes in history. Despite all this, though, Moulton closes his commentary by stating, “It remains for all time our American epic.”40 His “it” is the journey rather than the journals, which both justifies and diminishes his own great accomplishment as editor. More importantly, his phrase “for all time” signals a desire on the part of many (if not all) Americans who engage with the epic tradition: a desire to beat time, to transcend history in the name of something greater. A vital part of the fascination for me in undertaking this study has been how epic has made its home in history, and how important that truth is for understanding its place in American culture.
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