Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism(Modernist Literature and Culture)

The history of the epic-ranging from the heroic narratives of cultural origin found in Homer and Virgil to the tumultuous theological and political conflicts depicted by Dante or Milton-is nearly as old as literature itself. But the epic is also made and remade by its present, adapted to the pressures and formal necessities of its particular cultural moment. Examining modernist poetry's epic turn in the years between the two World Wars, C.D. Blanton's ambitious study charts the inversion of what Ezra Pound called "a poem including history" into a fractured and hollowed form, a "negated epic" that struggles not only to acknowledge the distant past but also to conceive its immediate present.Compelled to register the force of a larger historical totality it cannot directly represent, the negated epic reorients the function of poetic language, trading expression or signification for concrete but often buried reference, remaking the poem as an instrument of dialectical reason in the process. Epic Negation turns first to T. S. Eliot, productively pairing The Waste Land with The Criterion, the literary review it announced in 1922, to argue that Eliot's journal systematically realizes the editorial and critical method through which modernism's epochal poem sought to think its moment whole, developing a totalizing account of interwar culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, The Criterion not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the crisis facing bourgeois society, formed in the image of a Marxism it opposes.World War II's approach serves to organize the second half of Blanton's study, as he traces the dislocated formal effects of a serial epic gone underground. In the tense elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms cryptically divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness, what can be said in a poem from what cannot. And, finally, with H.D.'s Trilogy-written under bombardment in a terse exchange with Freud's famous rewriting of biblical history in Moses and Monotheism--the poetic image itself lapses, consigning epic to the silent historical force of the unconscious. Uniquely conceived and deftly executed, Epic Negation transforms our understanding of modernist poetics and the concept of epic more broadly.

Table of Contents:
Part I The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism Dialectical Poetics An Organ of Documentation: Eliot and Order Date Line: Including History Eliotic Marxism: Notes Toward a Dialectic of Culture Part II A poem is not poetry Auden's Monadology MacNeice's Dying Fall H.D.'s Incidents Notes Index

About the Author :
Blanton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. He is coeditor of A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Blackwell, 2009).

Review :
"...[An] ambitious, scholarly investigation into how certain modernist poets...handle history.... This volume...open[s] an important inquiry into the connections among art, politics, and history. Highly recommended." --CHOICE "Epic Negation represents a powerful, theoretically sophisticated, and cohesive account of twenty-five crucial years of twentieth-century British literary history, while offering a framework for a number of subtle new readings of key works from the end of World War I to the end of World War II. Along the way, C. D. Blanton engages in an impressive sweep of more localized literary historical investigations and theoretical reflections." --Tyrus Miller, author of Modernism and the Frankfurt School "Intricately studying allusion and intergeneric relations in late modernism, C. D. Blanton's capacious and deeply thoughtful Epic Negation traces how extrinsic voices, historical forces, and forms snake their way into even seemingly closed poems. With its fusion of sinuous close readings and lively theoretical analysis, Blanton's book makes a serious contribution to twentieth-century poetry studies." --Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres "C. D. Blanton revives the intractable subject of modern epic poetry by reminding us that thinkers and poets as divergent as Pound and Lukács were once engaged in a common dialectical project. In doing so, he puts back into circulation questions that sustained the feverish modernist debate about totality (and totalitarianism)-questions that may now help us understand poetry's possible relation to new forms of globalism." --Daniel Tiffany, author of My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch