A fellow blogger recently posted a brief response to my article advocating the return of epic poetry. It’s short enough that I can post the entire paragraph below:
The Return of the Muse has a piece on why we need new epic poetry. I can’t say that I agree, unless a very loose definition of epic is meant by. Our societies are too disunified, to fragmented to accept the text as embodying core cultural values, and embodying a clear and definable crisis in its history. Besides which, we lack that sense of history, purpose and technique in the long poem that would make this possible.
Actually, I think Phillip is on to something. He definately realizes the challenges that any new epic poetry might face, but I still disagree with his conclusion. Sure, society is disunified, but there still exists pockets within our very diverse modern world that have very strong viewpoints/ opinions which could sustain enough force and drive to produce an epic poem. But what I find most interesting is his observation that we lack the “history, purpose, and technique in the long poem that would make this possible.”
I’m not so certain that we do. After all, there are still some poems today that are widely read by mainstream Americans (and English-speakers at large). My two favorites are “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “Casey at the Bat.” These two poems provide a consistent 7-foot rhyming pair scheme that could define future American epics. I believe that such a poem with internal rhyming could fill the bill. I know it’s possible, because I’ve already written one that’s 86 pages long.
Also he says that our society does not have enough core values to accept an epic poem. This is not true. There are still large portions of society that would accept such core principles as Global Warming, Traditional Christainity, Islam, or Socialism, to name a few.
Finally, he makes his biggest blunder when he says our culture lacks “a clear and definable crisis in its history.” What about September 11th 2001? I’m sure every major Religion/ philosophy could write an epic poem about that one day.
Of course epic poetry can return. The idea that “our societies are too disunified, to[o] fragmented to accept the text as embodying core cultural values, and embodying a clear and definable crisis in its history” is a very popular one at this moment in the literary world. This point of view spawns our current overa-abundance of “avant-garde” poetry, which takes its impenetrable style and anti-technique from a theory-based look at the global canon as something that is not inherently reflective of a shared humanity, but something that is inherently unstable and incomprehensible in any even remotely universal way way by any two humans. This idea is very trendy right now. It is, in essence, the cornerstone of what we call the “post-modern” writer’s vision. Everything is disjointed. We are alienated. We stare into the abyss. Blah blah blah. As ar as I can tell, only dull and lazy people lack a “sense of history, purpose and technique…that would make this possible.” And there are plenty of excellent poets out there today who are being treated as pariahs by so-called “experts” in the academy, while simultaneously proving their critics wrong by finding publishers and audiences for their work. Good for you for writing an epic poem! We need more long, narrative poems…that’s for sure!
Wow! Thanks for your comment! The more I hear from people like you, the more I realize that we are the majority–not the postmoderns and their “anti-technique.”
The basis for the humanities is story. Even a lyric poem or a painting implies story — something there was that inspired. Who was she? What happened? Why that? There are answers to these questions and that is literature. It is disjointed only if the writer is.
You might like my post on trying to define classics at paisleyandplaid.wordpress.com.