Epilogue

Abstract

I have focused in part 2 on some of the most searching, self-critical, and powerful late twentieth-century poems deploying the topoi of Underworld descent and invocation of the shades in order to trace the ways these intertwined narratives have helped poets to work through their varying senses of the medium’s responsibility in and to the poet’s specific historical moment. There are, it must be said, other necromantic and katabatic poems in the archives of postwar poetry in English, and many others, from Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” to Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” to Walcott’s Arkansas Testament that can be profitably read with the Underworld descent as an interpretive horizon. What will probably strike readers more profoundly than the absence of any of these poems, however, is the absence from this book of those twentieth-century poems modeled on Underworld descents other than those of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante. What, one might ask, of Orpheus? Or Persephone? Or Inanna? I realized early in my work on this project that the book simply could not address the whole range of descent narratives, and I was driven by my own interests— both in individual poets like Heaney and Walcott and in the problematics of poetic responsibility—to focus on the descent of the epic hero or questing poet.