Carl Phillips: After the Afterlife of the Epic Tradition

Abstract

Epic is the genre of brutality. In the morning, the glittering young men march into the field; in the evening, the birds swoop down to peck at their corpses. In telling its violent stories of empire building, the epic tradition can appear pro-imperialist to some readers; anti-imperialist to others. But, at a more fundamental level, epic shows that there is no choice: we are made of brutal history, and this legacy shapes us both from without and within. Think of Michelangelo’s unfinished slaves: these massive figures are, as Gregg M. Horowitz points out, straining to escape from the rock of which they are made.1 Their contorted violent writhing concretizes a double bind: the massive stone that entraps them is the very thing from which they derive their being. Enter into Carl Phillips’s twelve books of poetry, and you at first seem to be in an entirely different world from epic. Phillips’s poems are not massive boulders, but small stones. Their rhetorical mode is not high and grand, but quotidian and low, sometimes almost awkward. The scenes they describe are for the most part personal, not world-historical. Yet Phillips, who studied Classics and taught high school Latin for almost ten years, is rare among living poets in his dynamic and uneasy awareness of the epic tradition. Traces of epic (as well as of other Greek and Latin literature) show everywhere in his poetry—not as reiteration, but as translation, transmutation, transfiguration. Phillips’s poetry shows the pentimenti of the epic tradition with its intertwined themes of human violence, nature, and beauty.