Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2012 Virgil's shipwreck: how a Roman poet made and unmade the epic in the west Jesse Bryan Burchfield Russell Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Russell, Jesse Bryan Burchfield, "Virgil's shipwreck: how a Roman poet made and unmade the epic in the west" (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2960. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2960 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. VIRGIL’S SHIPWRECK: HOW A ROMAN POET MADE AND UNMADE THE EPIC IN THE WEST A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdepartmental Program in Comparative Literature By Jesse Bryan Burchfield Russell B.A., Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2004 M.A., Franciscan University of Steubenville, 2005 M.A., Catholic University of America, 2007 December 2012 Dedication For my Jennifer, Lavinia mea, and my parents, James Russell and Lynette Zwerneman ii Acknowledgements A dissertation is a communal effort, and I would not have been able to finish it without my shipmates. First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Adelaide Russo, my dissertation director, for her patience with and kindness toward me during the writing process. I would not have been able to write this work without her help. Dr. Russo guided this little bark of a dissertation through many obstacles to its home at which I finally am able lay it to rest. Dr. Russo gave me strong words of encouragement when they were needed and gentle words of consolation when those were needed too. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee. I would like to thank Kevin Cope, my second reader, whose very Baroque method of teaching served as an inspiration to me and whose erudition has inspired me to delve deeply into the library. To Greg Stone, I would like to express my thanks for opening a new vista of Dante and for expanding my understanding of the Middle Ages. Dr. Stone’s ability to speak intelligently about Post-Modern philosophy as well as fourteenth century poetry in the courses I took with him were critical to this expansive dissertation as well as my overall research interests. I would like to thank Kristopher Fletcher for directing me to the right sources of Virgilian criticism and giving me the wise admonition to “just keep rereading Virgil.” This was one of the most valuable pieces of information that I received in the process. Also, Dr. Fletcher’s comments on my Virgil chapter greatly benefited my entire dissertation. To Suzanne Marchand, the Dean’s Representative, I express my thanks for the words, “choose the right authorities” because some “readers of Virgil are better than others.” iii I would to like to thank my family for their continued support and patience throughout the dissertation writing process. My wife Jennifer is truly my Lavinia, Beatrice, and, at times, my Gloriana. Her wisdom proved to be an invaluable guide, and like Dante’s Beatrice, Jennifer was a mediatrix of love and grace. To my three daughters, Beatrice, Gertrude, and Simone, who will read this work someday, I express my thanks for your patience with your father who had to cross many seas and fight many battles to lead us to home. I would further like to thank my father who always had an answer to my questions as a boy as well as his pointing to the “sinking star” that falls beyond the horizon. To my mother, whom I remember staying up late at the computer unlocking her own “word hoard” and crafting literature, I express my thanks for her exemplum of scholarship. iv Table of Contents Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………vi Introduction: Post-Modernity’s Critique of the Imperial Vision…………...…..…………. 1 Chapter 1 Plato and Martin Heidegger: Ancient and Post-Modern Readings of Poetry and Community ……..……………………………………………………………………………..………...........23 2 Virgil’s Imperial Vision……………………………………………..………………………………….....81 3 Dante’s Use of Virgil’s Epic: The Sacred and the Secular………………………………… 158 4 Edmund Spenser and the National Christian Epic…………………………………………..214 5 Ezra Pound and the Disastrous End of The Imperial Vision……..………….…………..269 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….……………………350 Works Cited……………………………….…………………………………………………………………… 357 Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….412 v Abstract We are still feeling the effects of the Second World War sixty-seven years after its conclusion. Much of post-war thinking has attempted to sort through the roots of the totalitarian ideology that developed in Europe and caused such massive destruction. Marxist and Frankfurt School critics have demonstrated that the roots of Fascism go deeper in the West than the twentieth century and are part and parcel of the West’s combination of technology and myth. Additionally, Post-Colonial critics have pointed out that the horrors of this war were also perpetrated throughout Europe’s colonial endeavors and have undertaken the task of deconstructing the ideology of European colonial powers. However, such criticism is both accurate and incomplete. Western civilization is not simply built upon ideology but also contains a long tradition of rational philosophy and self-criticism. In the West, Plato helped formulate an early poetics that was used in education to form and shape the soul and thus the community. In the twentieth century, the Germany philosopher Martin Heidegger modified Plato’s vision, showing how a people is formed through their culture and given their destiny. Plato and Heidegger’s poetics can be applied to the work of the Roman poet Virgil. Through his Aeneid, Virgil establishes a tradition of forming an exemplum of empire. In his exemplum of empire, Virgil presents a hero, prophecies that support the empire, and a sympathic but nonetheless demonized Other. Following Virgil’s lead, Dante Alighieri, Edmund Spenser, and Ezra Pound have sculpted their epics as imperial exempla. Each of these poets includes the Virgilian formula of a hero, vi prophecies, and an Other. At the same time, each poet develops a work that is not bound by imperialism but transcends its prejudice. vii Introduction Post-Modernity’s Critique of the Imperial Vision At the end of July 1941, Klos, a baker from Warsaw Poland, successfully escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was from barrack 14, a housing unit for sickly prisoners. In response, the prisoners of barrack 14 were to be punished: ten prisoners were taken and killed. They were lined up in order and forced to stand at attention for hours. SS Karl Fritsch, the assistant commandant of Auschwitz, began to select prisoners to be killed in reprisal for the escape. When one of the prisoners was chosen, a Pole named Francis Gajowniczek, he began to cry that he had a family and clamored for mercy. In response, another Polish prisoner from barrack 14, Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest, stepped forward and, in German, calmly asked to stand in Gajowniczek’s place. The SS commandants were shocked and asked Kolbe what his profession was. Fr. Maximilian responded, “I am a Catholic Priest” (Frossard 195). Fr. Maximilian Kolbe was assigned to a barracks in which he and the other prisoners would be starved to death. The prisoners were forced to strip their clothes and were placed in a small cell. As the prisoners began to die, Fr. Maximilian attended to them and comforted those who were still surviving. For fourteen days, Fr. Maximilian stood in the cell until he and three others were killed by having phenic acid injected into their veins. Fr. Maximilian’s example of heroics and self-sacrifice were by no means unique; many of those persecuted showed surprising humanity and altruism.1 1 For information on St. Maximilian Kolbe and his martyrdom, see André Frossard’s Forget not Love: The Passion of Maximilian Kolbe, Patricia Treece’s A Man for Others: In response to a letter written by the Catholic Bishop of Utrecht, Netherlands denouncing the deportation of Jews from Holland, which was read at all Catholic parishes in Holland on July 26, 1942, Nazi officials retaliated by targeting Jewish converts to Catholicism. On August 2, two S.S. officers drove to the Carmelite monastery at Echt to arrest a nun whose religious name was Sr. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (née Edith Stein) as well as her sister Rosa. The two sisters were first taken to Roermond and then Amersfoort where they were united with other Jewish converts to Christianity. The prisoners were then taken to Westerbork, which served as one of the primary camps in Holland. The humiliation to which Sr. Theresa and others were subjected will be familiar to anyone who has studied the German treatment of civilians during the Second World War. The prisoners were shuffled in and out of a maze of rooms and were required to fill out the paperwork that would later condemn them. Sr. Theresa, like Fr. Maximilian, responded by comforting and caring for the other prisoners. Eventually, Sr. Theresa was put on a train to Auschwitz, where like Fr. Maximilian, she died.2 Fr. Maximilian Kolbe and Sr. Theresa Benedicta were later canonized saints in the Roman Catholic Church and now are venerated as martyrs of the Holocaust. In the lives and deaths of these two religious figures, two divergent understandings of community come into conflict.