Ambition and anxiety : Ezra Pound's Cantos and Derek Walcott's Omeros as twentieth-century epics
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Ambition and anxiety : Ezra Pound's Cantos and Derek Walcott's Omeros as twentieth-century epics
(Cross/cultures : readings in the post/colonial literatures in English, 88)
Rodopi, 2006
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [299]-312) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Homer and Genre
2. Dante and Christian Epic
3. Epic Anxiety and Imperialistic Epic
4. Metonymic Epic
5. Caribbean Epic
6. Metaphoric Epic
Works Cited
Index
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