C. D. Blanton, Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

Abstract

C. D. Blanton centres his book around Ezra Pound’s simple yet challenging statement that ‘[a]n epic is a poem including history’ (3). Far from drawing expected connections between classical epic and modernist poetry, Blanton’s book aims ‘to account for the emergence of the modernist epic as the central formal problem of an apparently postepic age’ (3). Can a ‘modernist epic’ be thus detected as a distinct genre? And is this indeed the best way to describe works by such modernist poets as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and H.D.? Blanton identifies a modernist epic in a variety of textual units. Most strikingly, he labels Eliot’s review The Criterion, MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), and H.D.’s Trilogy (1946) as modernist epics, encouraging modernist scholars to reconsider these works in a new, rather unexpected light. According to Blanton, the late modernist poem’s ‘laconic force, its ambition to make history a part of poetry’s domain’ was not entirely comprehended by scholars (12). With Lukács’s argument about the impossibility of a modern epic in mind, and based on the genre’s problematic ‘ultimate principle of totality’, Blanton argues for a late modernist epic which asserts itself by using the ‘paradoxically totalizing force of negation’ which he feels is ‘at the formal heart of … modernism’ (6).