No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America's Lost Epic Tradition

No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America.s Lost Epic Tradition explores the exigencies of the epic traditions in American poetry. I examine the novelization of the epic and the concomitant lyricization of poetry within American literary history before positing an extant albeit chthonic epic tradition best exemplified in the 19th century by Herman Melville's Clarel and in the 20th century by Louis Zukofsky's "A". I argue that while the epic tradition stemming from Wordsworth through Whitman and on to Pound is indeed defunct, an alternative epic tradition exemplified by Melville and Zukofsky's use of Milton is alive and well, although it goes unrecognized. I ground my notions of epic in the prevailing discourses about the genre in 20th century American literary criticism and link my definitions to the basic tenets outlined by Aristotle. By offering provisional definitions of epic, yet ones specific enough to justify the use of what has often been a contentious term, I attempt to bring aspects of the poems that often go unnoticed into relief so that otherwise seemingly unrelated poetic projects can be realigned and understood as part of a tradition that tests the critical reception of epic in general, and Clarel and "A" in particular. Attending to the epic qualities in these poems may also lead us to ponder how our understanding of them is predicated on what we imagine a poem to be.;In a series of chapters on Melville, I illustrate the ways in which epic discourse has been deflected in the criticism of Clarel toward either the novel or the lyric. I then offer a close reading of Clarel as an epic, attending specifically to the role of the storyteller, the condition of the characters, and the function of the landscape. In the next chapters, I turn my attention to Zukofsky. After considering the limitations of the postmodernist and autobiographical readings of "A", I compare the poem to Ezra Pound's Cantos in order to delineate the problems with situating "A" within the tradition of the modern verse epic. I then offer a considered reading of "A" both structurally and thematically as an epic. Finally, I conclude with a brief epilogue that looks at the way epic informs possibilities in postmodern 21st century writing, where genre distinctions remain suspect and are sources for hybridization more than distinct categorization. I use Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy to focus my analysis, examining the epic resources she draws on in the construction of her hybridized poetic text.