Abstract
If Pound’s A Draft of XVI Cantos takes Odysseus’s invocation of Tiresias as the model for its opening, the sequence models its climax on the katabatic descents of Aeneas and, especially, Dante. Pound establishes a powerful model for poets who set out to criticize their contemporary society (or elements of it) by condemning it to (or suggesting that it already is in or simply that it itself is) Hell. This chapter begins with an analysis of Pound’s Cantos XIV and XV, then turns to some poems by poets who have followed Pound into Hell, adapting his path for their own purposes just as he adapts Dante’s for his. My argument in this chapter comprises two claims. First, I will show how modern poets have used the katabasis to frame moments of cultural critique, at once deploying the narrative to dramatize problems in contemporary society and borrowing and reinvesting the cultural capital of this epic topos in order to articulate specific critiques to the tradition of European literature. In addition, I will argue that modern katabases tend to fall into two groups. On one hand, many of these poems either offer philosophical or aesthetic or religious transformation as the way out of the Underworld through which they figure and critique their societies or they are silent on such possibilities. On the other hand, a countertradition articulates through katabatic episodes not only critique but also explicitly political possibilities for social change.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Wendy Stallard Flory, Ezra Pound and the Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 34
James Bronterre O’Brien, A Vision of Hell, or, Peep into the Realms Below, Alias Lord Overgrown’s Dream (London: GG Holyoake, undated [early 1850s])
Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005).
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1971).
C ountee Cullen, My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Wr itings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 79.
Hart Crane, The Bridge ( 1929) in Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York: Liveright, 1987), 98.
Susan Schultz, “The Success of Failure: Hart Crane’s Revisions of Whitman and Eliot in The Bridge,” South Atlantic Review 54.1 (January, 1989), 55–70
Hart Crane, “The Tunnel,” The Criterion 6 (November 1927), 398–402.
Edward Brunner, Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 100–102.
T.S. Eliot, Pour Quartets (1943) (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 17.
Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 15.
Thomas F. Merrill, The Poetry of Charles Olson: A Primer (Newark: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Press, 1982), 103.
Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 67
Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 143–50
Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 95–157.
Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Robert Creeley, ed., Charles Olson: Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1967), 15–30 [26].
Sterling A. Brown, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (New York: Harper, 1980), 89.
John Edgar Tidwell, “Sterling Brown,” in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, Trudier Harris, eds., Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104–6
Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).
Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror : The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2005), 4–6.
B.A. Botkin, ed., Folk Say IV: The Landls Ours (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 252
James E. Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford, 1999), 64
Louis Zukofsky, All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923–1964 (New York: WW. Norton, 1971), 77.
Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (New York: Covici and Friede, 1938), 146.
Roy Campbell, The Collected Poems of Roy Campbell, vol. 2 (London: Bodley Head, 1957), 87.
Rosenthal, Poetry of the Spanish Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 108.
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), v.
This impressionism is part of what has bothered many critics of the poem. John Lehmann, for example, criticized the poem for “rather too conspicuously elaborating the picture of an easy-going but attractive personality” instead of representing depth of thought and political commitment (Lehmann, New Writing in Europe [Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 1940], 116). For an overview of the poem’s reception focused on critics’ disagreement over whether MacNeice was “unable to commit himself to idealistic belief and political action” or “a sophisticated skeptic,” see Beret Strong, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 188–192.
For a comprehensive treatment of the events that inspired Rukeyser’s sequence, see Martin Cherniack, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
For other important readings of the sequence, see Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery, and Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 169–210.
John Wheelwright, “Review of U.S. I,” Partisan Review 4 (March 1938), 54–56.
Quoted in Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 1995), 233.
Robyn Marsack, The Cave of Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 48.
Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 1988), 67.
Copyright information
© 2009 Michael Thurston
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thurston, M. (2009). Katabasis as Cultural Critique. In: The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102149_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102149_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38283-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10214-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)