Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's Cantos and Derek Walcott's Omeros as Twentieth-century Epics

Voorkant
Rodopi, 2006 - 342 pagina's
This comparative study investigates the epic lineage that can be traced back from Derek Walcott's Omeros and Ezra Pound's Cantos through Dante's Divina Commedia to the epic poems of Virgil and Homer, and identifies and discusses in detail a number of recurrent key topoi. A fresh definition of the concept of genre is worked out and presented, based on readings of Homer. The study reads Pound's and Walcott's poetics in the light of Roman Jakobson's notions of metonymy and metaphor, placing their long poems at the respective opposite ends of these language poles. The notion of 'epic ambition' refers to the poetic prestige attached to the epic genre, whereas the (non-Bloomian) 'anxiety' occurs when the poet faces not only the risk that his project might fail, but especially the moral implications of that ambition and the fear that it might prove presumptuous. The drafts of Walcott's Omeros are here examined for the first time, and attention is also devoted to Pound's creative procedures as illustrated by the drafts of the Cantos. Although there has already been an intermittent critical focus on the 'classical' (and 'Dantean') antecedents of Walcott's poetry, the present study is the first to bring together the whole range of epic intertextualities underlying Omeros, and the first to read this Caribbean masterpiece in the context of Pound's achievement.

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Inhoudsopgave

Dante and Christian Epic
49
Epic Anxiety and Imperialistic Epic
105
4
144
Metonymic Epic
185
5
231
6
263
Copyright

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Populaire passages

Pagina 67 - I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.
Pagina 165 - The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines : one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively.
Pagina 73 - PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Pagina 87 - You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 'They called me the hyacinth girl.' — Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed
Pagina 94 - Terracina. I would erect a temple to Artemis in Park Lane. I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy.
Pagina 128 - Facesti come quei che va di notte, che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova, ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte, quando dicesti: 'Secol si rinova; torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, e progenie scende da ciel nova.
Pagina 198 - In which sad light a carved dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100 Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug
Pagina 102 - Greeks called him a Poet, which name hath, as the most excellent, gone through other languages. It cometh of this word fo'ein, which is " to make " ; wherein I know not whether by luck or wisdom we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him a maker.
Pagina 167 - ... reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects...
Pagina 69 - Henceforth, I learn that to obey is best, And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend, Merciful over all his works, with good...

Over de auteur (2006)

LINE HENRIKSEN is an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School and lives in Copenhagen and Brussels. She has an MA from York University (UK) and a doctorate from Copenhagen University, and is a trained conference interpreter. She has always been fascinated by Homer and Dante, and studied "filologia Dantesca" at the University of Florence as an undergraduate.

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