Lyrical Epic (A Glimpse into the Art of Long Narrative Poetry in American Contemporary and Modern Literature)

Author: Huang Zongying
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: Pound believed his modern epic Cantos was "a mouth speaking the speech of a nation." This assertion directly reveals a core issue in the creation of contemporary American long poems: the compatibility of lyricism and epic quality. This work employs textual analysis methods to comprehensively examine the characteristics of lyricism and epic quality coexisting in long poems, revealing the distinctive features of American contemporary long poems in terms of thematic content and artistic expression compared to Western traditional epics. It demonstrates the scientific validity and rationality of the concept of the "lyric epic," thereby making a unique contribution to defining this artistic characteristic of contemporary American long poems. At the same time, it fills the gaps in domestic and international research on grand-scale, complex, and obscure American contemporary long poems, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), Eliot's The Waste Land (1992), Williams's Paterson (1946), Crane's The Bridge (1930), Pound's Cantos (1925–1972), Berryman's Dream Songs (1969), Olson's Maximus Poems (1960–1975), and Zhukovsky's A (1978), thereby undertaking a bold and meaningful attempt to better grasp an important genre in American literature.