Katabasis as Cultural Critique

  • Michael Thurston
Chapter

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.

Keywords

Contemporary Society Cultural Critique Racial Oppression Cold Hell Modern Poet 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 2.
    Wendy Stallard Flory, Ezra Pound and the Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 34Google Scholar
  2. 3.
    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])Google Scholar
  3. 13.
    Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
  4. 14.
    Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1971).Google Scholar
  5. 15.
    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.Google Scholar
  6. 16.
    Hart Crane, The Bridge ( 1929) in Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York: Liveright, 1987), 98.Google Scholar
  7. 17.
    Susan Schultz, “The Success of Failure: Hart Crane’s Revisions of Whitman and Eliot in The Bridge,” South Atlantic Review 54.1 (January, 1989), 55–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. 19.
    Hart Crane, “The Tunnel,” The Criterion 6 (November 1927), 398–402.Google Scholar
  9. Edward Brunner, Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 100–102.Google Scholar
  10. 21.
    T.S. Eliot, Pour Quartets (1943) (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 17.Google Scholar
  11. 22.
    Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 15.Google Scholar
  12. 23.
    Thomas F. Merrill, The Poetry of Charles Olson: A Primer (Newark: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Press, 1982), 103.Google Scholar
  13. 24.
    Walter Kalaidjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 67Google Scholar
  14. 25.
    Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 143–50Google Scholar
  15. Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 95–157.Google Scholar
  16. 26.
    Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Robert Creeley, ed., Charles Olson: Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1967), 15–30 [26].Google Scholar
  17. 31.
    Sterling A. Brown, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (New York: Harper, 1980), 89.Google Scholar
  18. 32.
    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), 104–6Google Scholar
  19. 33.
    Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).Google Scholar
  20. 34.
    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.Google Scholar
  21. 37.
    B.A. Botkin, ed., Folk Say IV: The Landls Ours (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 252Google Scholar
  22. 38.
    James E. Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford, 1999), 64Google Scholar
  23. 43.
    Louis Zukofsky, All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923–1964 (New York: WW. Norton, 1971), 77.Google Scholar
  24. 48.
    Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (New York: Covici and Friede, 1938), 146.Google Scholar
  25. 49.
    Roy Campbell, The Collected Poems of Roy Campbell, vol. 2 (London: Bodley Head, 1957), 87.Google Scholar
  26. Rosenthal, Poetry of the Spanish Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 108.Google Scholar
  27. 50.
    Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), v.Google Scholar
  28. 51.
    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.Google Scholar
  29. 52.
    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).Google Scholar
  30. 53.
    Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).Google Scholar
  31. 54.
    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)Google Scholar
  32. 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.Google Scholar
  33. 55.
    John Wheelwright, “Review of U.S. I,” Partisan Review 4 (March 1938), 54–56.Google Scholar
  34. 56.
    Quoted in Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 1995), 233.Google Scholar
  35. 57.
    Robyn Marsack, The Cave of Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 48.Google Scholar
  36. 60.
    Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 1988), 67.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Michael Thurston 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Michael Thurston

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations