By Line Henriksen
This comparative learn investigates the epic lineage that may be traced again from Derek Walcott's Omeros and Ezra Pound's Cantos via Dante's Divina Commedia to the epic poems of Virgil and Homer, and identifies and discusses intimately a few recurrent key topoi. A clean definition of the concept that of style is labored out and provided, in accordance with readings of Homer. The research reads Pound's and Walcott's poetics within the mild of Roman Jakobson's notions of metonymy and metaphor, putting their lengthy poems on the respective contrary ends of those language poles. The suggestion of 'epic ambition' refers back to the poetic status connected to the epic style, while the (non-Bloomian) 'anxiety' happens whilst the poet faces not just the chance that his venture may possibly fail, yet in particular the ethical implications of that ambition and the phobia that it may well turn out presumptuous. The drafts of Walcott's Omeros are right here tested for the 1st time, and a focus is usually dedicated to Pound's inventive methods as illustrated by means of the drafts of the Cantos. even though there has already been an intermittent severe specialise in the 'classical' (and 'Dantean') antecedents of Walcott's poetry, the current research is the 1st to compile the entire diversity of epic intertextualities underlying Omeros, and the 1st to learn this Caribbean masterpiece within the context of Pound's success.
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Extra resources for Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros' as Twentieth-Century Epics (Cross Cultures 88) (Cross Cultures)
Sample text
110 Peisistratos’ rule at Athens seems to have been decisive for the poems as we know them today. Skafte Jensen warns against paying heed to the notion that the Peisistratidai traced their lineage to Nestor’s son, who joins Telemachus on the journey to Sparta in Odyssey 3.
But to Adam in what sort Shall I appear? shall I to him make known As yet my change, and give him to partake Full happiness with me, or rather not, But keep the odds of knowledge in my power Without copartner? so to add what wants In female sex, the more to draw his love, And render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesirable, sometime Superior; for inferior who is free? , I X , 816–25)75 If we turn to our modern epics, Pound’s portrayal of Circe in Cantos 39 and 47 fits the archaic model of woman as possessive and scheming.
He sent me here to Troy commanding me to act always with valour, always to be most noble, never to shame the line [genos] of my progenitors, great men first in Ephyra, then in Lycia. That is the blood and birth [geneê] I claim. ” With “blood and birth,” Fitzgerald has reversed the word order of Homer’s “haimatos” (of haima, ‘blood’) and “geneês” (of geneê). ”17 Murray’s “this is the lineage and the blood whereof I avow me sprung” follows Homer’s word order; the verb ‘to spring’ stresses origins.