The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic

Author

Giacomo R. Bianchino, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

Peter Hitchcock

Committee Members

Richard Kaye

Mary McGlynn

Subject Categories

American Literature | Comparative Literature | Italian Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America

Keywords

Epic, Italian, English, Pound, D'Annunzio, MacDiarmid

Abstract

This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was no longer available to literature, and how they conceived of their own projects as means of restoring this totality. In doing so, the dissertation proposes a fourfold schema for reading modern epic: the political stakes of their model of history; the magnitude of the poem; the object and structure of its political address and modes of interpellation; and the way that each poem authorizes its poet as a representative of society.

To build this theory, the study examines three examples of modern epic poetry. It draws its choices from what it calls the “classical period” in European class struggle, from about 1871-1945 (and arguably forward to 1970). In this period, poetry in general and the epic particular were mobilized by political movements: and each of the chosen poems are drawn from the world of Reaction or of Communism. The first is Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Maia (1903), the first volume of his Laudi del Cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi; the second is Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1917-1962); the third is Hugh MacDiarmid’s Mature Art (1936-1938). Through a close examination of the formal devices in each poem, it brings out their unique conception of the relationship between the epic and political reality. It then traces the implications of this conception for their own active interventions “beyond” the poem.

From these case studies, the dissertation develops a historical argument for the way that political ideology inflected the formulation of the modern epic. While the reactionary or right-wing poets tried to drag society along behind them towards some earthly paradise, MacDiarmid’s leftist epic put itself at the service of a movement –the international struggle for communism– whose political success was to be the condition of his own poem’s fulfilment. I argue that this is an epic model sufficient to the dialectical requirements of modernity.

This dissertation offers, then, three lessons to criticism. It provides a theory of modern epic that can be used to study other long poems of the twentieth century. It also makes a positive claim for the way that socialist writers approached the problem of the social totality through a theory of dialectical negation. Finally, it provides some tools for thinking through the active relation between poetry and politics from a historically materialist perspective.

Recommended Citation

Bianchino, Giacomo R., "The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5877