‘On Epic Madness’: A Poem by Bruce Dale Wise

“As Aeschylus said that his tragedies were τεμάχη
of the great Homer’s banquet, so my poems draw on them.”
—Acwiles Berude

“On Epic Madness” is a poem of the Spring of 2014. Written in iambic heptameters, it is an homage to the opening of Homer’s “Iliad”, that fountain of Ancient Greek literature, where “poetry” first begins its remarkable run of millennia.

Seeing it now, for the first time in print, I was wondering what poetic form I would call these eighteen lines of iambic heptameter. I agree with Ms. Coats that “dirge” is as good a nomenclature as any, though this poem is rather different than those by Sidney, Shakespeare, Shelley, or Christina Rossetti. It’s a rather strange poem in that it shows the direction I was heading poetically back then, a decade ago; but it is the type of work I really wouldn’t, or want to, write today.

Ms. Coats’ second observation hits the mark, exactly where I mentally had positioned the poem: “a place within an epic”, which is really where I have been for the last forty years—daring an epic, but simultaneously realizing it is an impossibility at the present moment, despite all the so-called “epics” written in the last forty years, mainly because of the prosody one finds in these PostModernist and NewMillennial periods.

I think, of all the writers in English, T. S. Eliot understood this dilemma best, seen especially in his two essays on Milton; for even Milton, relying on the development of blank verse in Elizabethan poetic drama, could not match that kinetic power; even while he strove to make the language more plastic and powerful. Though other traditions than the Greek, like that of King David in his hymns, exist, it is the Greek tradition I focused on here, interspersed with “This plan of God”, the Miltonic allusion in “adamantine seal”, and the Greco-Christian “Priest Crisis”. Though the proper nouns are geographical, rather than Biblical, Milton was in my mind at the time.

In retrospect, I appreciate the nuance of the title, the division of the poem, which begins, in the middle of a couplet with the question of L10: “Who brought this death into the World?” and, in particular, the Dickinsonian slant rhyme of the final couplet, and the third stanza overall, invoking Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, as well as scattered Homeric “grace” notes.

Finally, what surprises me most about the “angst” of the poem Ms. Brinton succinctly brings up, is how easy the poem was for me to write, and what I had gotten ahold of in its lines. It shows me viscerally the power not only of Ancient Greek epic, but more importantly, Ancient Greek civilization. The Greek contribution to the World was so enormous, not even a writer as polished as Vergil could ignore it.

And we might ask, as Stalin did, “How many legions does the Pope have?” Once again, I’m glad I’m not a Russian.

One of my favorite essays of T. S. Eliot is that short one entitled “Poetry in the Eighteenth Century.” Over the years I return to that little gem, even more so than to his poetry, his drama, and other pieces of his criticism. It is an essay that lacks the grandiloquent statements found in his more famous works; and yet it is an essay not lacking those bold, aesthetic pronouncements that are so typical of the Eliotic mode.
He begins his essay with the suggestion for an essay on the quotations of Walter Scott used for the chapter headings of his novels, a ludicrous suggestion, though one in which Eliot would be interested, captivated as he was by such allusion. It is on one of those quotations that Eliot begins his essay,
“His fall was destin’d to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand…”
and then, concludes his essay, in a Shakespearean moment, in reference to the above couplet and its following lines from Samuel Johnson, “if lines 189-220 of The Vanity of Human Wishes are not poetry, I do not know what it is.” Eliot admired fellow critic and poet Samuel Johnson, and this essay is a vehicle for that admiration, as well as other tastes and distastes.
He next begins to generalize about the poetry of the 18th century, after pointing out how dangerous it is to do so. The second paragraph offers this insightful and perceptive observation: “that after Pope there was no one who thought and felt nearly enough like Pope to be able to use his language quite successfully.” Here his perspicacity is uncanny; like Johnson, he is a fine critic and a reasonable poet. As far as I know, only Eliot in the last two-and-a-half centuries knew this. I only wish he had realized, along with most of the writers of the last two-hundred-and-fifty years, Pope’s importance in normalizing British criticism.
Eliot’s third paragraph, insightful throughout, contains several excellent points: first, “The originality of Gray and Collins consists in their adaptation of an Augustan style to an eighteenth-century sensibility”; second, Goldsmith…”is Augustan and also sentimental and rural without discordance”; third, Johnson is a “die-hard”; and, finally, “Goldsmith and Johnson deserve fame because…to be original with the minimum of alteration is sometimes more distinguished than to be original with the maximum of alteration.” In thinking about, say, for example, the Latin hexameter, from Ennius on, one can see how exactly right Eliot’s statement is.
In the fourth paragraph, he gives a list of important English poets, whom he argues were also fine prose writers: Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, and various Romantic figures. His main thesis here is that verse is poetry when it has the virtues of good prose; a few of his examples suffice: “Donne makes poetry out of a learned but colloquial dialogue speech, Dryden out of the prose of political oratory; and Pope out of the most polished drawing-room manner.”
Paragraph number five extends his thesis. He points out that people who condemn or ignore the poetry of the eighteenth century because it is prosaic, really aren’t distinguishing between good prose and bad prose. “To have the virtues of good prose is the first and minimum requirement of good poetry,” Eliot asserts; and I agree; because Eliot’s poetry, as awful as it frequently was, still surpasses that of such lesser lights as Yeats, Frost, Auden, Thomas, Stevens, Larkin, Lowell, Wilbur, et. al.
Eliot begins the sixth paragraph with an indictment of verse lacking the virtues of prose, and then points out how blank verse was developed by Shakespeare [and others] “so that it could carry the burdens and exhibit the subtleties of prose”; and, I would add, in Milton’s hands, the duty of epic.
But Eliot, for all of his excellences, had little stomach for Milton’s epical style, and proceeds in his next paragraph to show how “a good deal of the dreariest verse of the time was written under the shadow of Milton.” He is quite right. Nevertheless, much of the dreadful verse in Eliot’s works is sheer “Miltonic stuff” too. One example from The Wasteland suffices.
“Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid–troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odors; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the lacqueria,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the colored stone,
In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.”
Eliot fought Milton, but not hard enough.
In paragraph number seven, he makes another “dangerous,” albeit useful generalization about eighteenth-century verse after Pope, Swift, Prior, and Gray: “It seems more like an age of retired country gentlemen and schoolmasters. It is cursed with a Pastoral convention,” precisely because “it is intolerably poetic” and “merely applied the magniloquence of Milton or the neatness of Pope to matter which is wholly unprepared for it; so that what the writers have to say always appears surprised at the way in which they choose to say it.” Really not unlike the above lines from The Wasteland, or so much of the nebulous Postmodernist, Deconstructionist fluff.
Paragraph eight points out the uniqueness of Samuel Johnson in his antipathy toward and intolerance of the movements of his time. That is one of the qualities Eliot admired in Johnson; certainly, at least, because he found himself in just such a position.
In the ninth paragraph, Eliot states his preference for the latter of Johnson’s only two satires, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. That Eliot did not think Juvenal, Johnson’s model, any better shows a lapse in discernment that is rare in Eliot’s criticism; though he does point out how Johnson was closer in spirit to Juvenal than either Dryden or Pope were. It is from assorted couplets of Johnson that Eliot gets what he calls “the minimal quality of poetry.” One couplet he draws attention to is
“There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail.”
He then notes, “How little, how very little, good poetry there is.” How true, how true; and, as Pope noted, even less good criticism.
In his conclusion, Eliot makes some final remarks, one which deserves particular mention; because it points out not the difficulty of appreciating poetry in our time, but the difficulty of appreciating poetry as poetry in our time. He writes, “I sometimes think that our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry.”