Category error: reframing the 'Modernist epic'

"Category Error: Reframing the 'Modernist Epic'"

I was looking at a letter exchange between Hart Crane and Yvor Winters and I thought: what children these men were, like Alexander Pope at his worst, and how awful it would have been to discuss anything with either one. Look at them, just look at them squabbling over the term 'epic' and its applicability or not to Hart Crane's The Bridge. Winters appears to have been basically a sour, choleric man, although he has insight to share in-between the fits. Crane was an emotionally-turbulent, undisciplined ricochet of an alcoholic who was, in this instance, clearly attaching private, fetishistic emphasis on the syllables "e" and "pic". One could be forgiven for wishing Yvor Winters had been a junky, and Hart Crane an espresso fiend. Things could hardly have gone any worse, and their personal relationship could hardly have been more acrimonious and explosive. Imagine publicly denouncing a brilliant masterpiece over a disagreement so trivial, thereby trashing a man's reputation who, faults aside, was always the better and the brighter of the two (if not the stable one likely to live to a ripe old age)!

Now, as to what they were discussing, both men's positions are bollocks. It is quite clear that the Classical epic obeys certain rules and adopts certain trappings which were particular to the Classical civilisation. The Western long poem, on the other hand, is a genre which has flourished in the last two centuries in our civilisation. Examples of the Western long poem include T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, William Wordsworth's The Prelude, James Merill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Hart Crane's The Bridge, and David Jones' The Anathemata, a charred copy of which is in front of me. It was one of the books Professor Wizard managed to save back when his home was fire-bombed.

The Western long poem, to conclude, is a genre all its own; but it has always had something of an identity crisis. You would not believe the tortured extent to which authors of such works go to convince others that they are writing epics rather than glorying in the authentic, particular merit of what they are about. The Bridge, to conclude, is a fine poem, and it needs no other descriptive; or if it does need one, then let that descriptive recognize its essentially Western rather than Classical origins. Granted, future generations of sour art critics and alcoholic long poem authors will find some other triviality to savage each other about, but at least this particular knife is now stored on a high shelf.