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“Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel”: America's Homosexual

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“Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel”: America's Homosexual 1 “Putting my Queer Shoulder to the Wheel”: America’s Homosexual Epics in the Twentieth Century Catherine A. Davies University College London UMI Number: U592005 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U592005 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 I, Catherine Davies, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Index Pages 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 47 “Stranger in America”: Hart Crane’s Homosexual Epic 105 “It occurs to me that I am America”: Ginsberg’s Epic Poems and the Queer Shoulder 165 “Narcissus bent / Above the gene pool”: Merrill’s Epic of Childlessness 203 John Ashbery’s Flow Chart: “The natural noise of the present” 247 Postscript 254 Bibliography 4 Abstract This thesis examines five poems by four twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems o f These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashbery’s Flow Chart (1991). Although it is not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, the thesis considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that rethink the relationship between these two spheres. The difficulties presented by the epic poem’s foundations in commonality constitute the starting-point for this discussion of four homosexual poets who have risen to the ideological challenge that the epic tradition presents for a minority voice. The thesis examines how these poets have rethought and modified the epic poem, and explores the different kinds of dialogue each develops with their precursors, both European and American. It also pays close attention to the ways in which each poem figures its presumed audience. 5 Introduction This thesis examines a number of twentieth-century poems that explore the epic mode for a modem age. Undertaking a series of readings of poems that I have termed “homosexual epics”, I argue for the existence of a genealogy of American epic poems that renegotiate the conventions governing the relationship between the public and the private - a genealogy that I trace back to Walt Whitman’s Leaves o f Grass. I use the term “homosexual epic” to demarcate this group of poems written by male poets who are homosexual, but whose sexuality is not necessarily reflected explicitly in the contents of their poems. Rather, this thesis proposes that these poets’ homosexuality problematizes the contractual pact of the epic mode; a pact based on representability presumed of the epic poet.1 As well as the poets’ sexuality, the selection of texts was determined by a number of other criteria. With the exception of “Howl”, all the poems considered here have been published in book-length form.2 I use the term “epic” in reference to these poems in so far as they distinguish themselves from other long poems by all exhibiting, in different quotients, a concern to engage with ideas of American nationhood (most explicitly seen in the case of Crane’s and Ginsberg’s poems). These poems 1 For an account of approaches to the contractual nature of the epic genre, see Adeline Johns- Putra, The History of the Epic (Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3-4. 2 The Changing Light at Sandover was originally published as three individual poems: “The Book o f Ephraim” in Divine Comedies (1976), Mirabel!’s Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980). The poems were collected together as The Changing Light at Sandover and published in a single book-length volume with an additional coda, “The Higher Keys”, in 1982. The publication in 1995 of the “Original Draft and Facsimile” edition of “Howl” also arguably qualifies Ginsberg’s earlier poem for inclusion under this criteria. See ‘HOWL ORIGINAL DRAFT FACSIMILE, TRANSCRIPT & VARIANT VERSIONS, FULLY ANNOTATED BY A UTHOR, WITH CONTEMPORANEOUS CORREPSONDENCE, ACCOUNT OF FIRST PUBLIC READING, LEGAL SKIRMISHES, PRECURSOR TEXTS & BIBLIOGRAPHY, ed. Barry Miles (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995). also share an awareness of their relationship to the various traditions of epic, in terms of their inter-textual dialogue, both with one another and with their epic precursors; all, in their very different ways, emulate the formal ambition and encyclopaedic scope of the traditional epic. Any attempt to define concisely the nature of the “epic” is made difficult by the imprecise use made of the term in contemporary culture to describe novels, films, and television series, as well as to encompass such diverse poems as The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, and The Cantos. However, the difficulties of defining epic are arguably common to any genre which incorporates and absorbs mutations and aberrations. It is in the evolution of the epic tradition that this thesis locates its interest, considering such questions as: How have issues of nationhood been reinvigorated by the development in popular culture and its representation in poetry? How has the epic voice been reconsidered in the postmodern era? All four poets examined here consider themselves to be in some way contributing to the tradition of epic. Crane set out explicitly to rethink the epic for the modem age in The Bridge, speaking of a desire to express in poetry the “mystical synthesis of America”. Similarly, Ginsberg imagined The Fall of America to be an epic “about present-day politics”; it was his attempt at a “dis­ sociated thought stream which includes politics and history”.4 The Changing Light at Sandover is also clearly indebted to a Dantesque epic vision of the afterlife, while Ashbery’s Flow Chart develops its dialogue with Wordsworthian 3 Hart Crane to Gorham Munson, 18 February 1923, O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, edited by Langdon Hammer & Brom Weber (New York & London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997), 131. 4 Ginsberg, “Interview with Tom Clark”, in Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, ed. David Carter (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 49-50. self-reflection, as an autobiographical epic that taps into the “bloodstream of our collective memory”.5 This thesis begins by assessing Hart Crane’s epic, The Bridge (1930), focusing on its uneasy marriage of a Whitmanian heritage with Crane’s modernist aspirations. I follow this with a discussion of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and The Fall of America (1972), developing readings of these poems that stress their use of the tradition of the epic’s descent into the underworld. The fourth chapter examines James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), which is here read as establishing an elaborate cosmology that radically places the homosexual and the childless at its very centre. My final chapter on John Ashbery approachesFlow Chart (1991), his longest poem, as a postmodernist version of Wordsworth’s attempt in The Prelude to present the “growth of a poet’s mind”. In considering the field of epic I follow both Brian Wilkie6 and Adeline Johns-Putra in approaching “epic” as what Johns-Putra calls “an accumulation of definitions”.7 Both Wilkie and Johns-Putra see the category of “epic” as being endlessly redefined by the works that seek to extend the boundaries of the mode and redefine its nature, and are concerned in their work to concentrate on the variety within the epic terrain rather than to attempt the difficult task of setting out strict boundaries which are persistently being re-drawn. 5 John Ashbery, Flow Chart (London: Carcanet, 1991), 27. 6 See Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Wisconsin: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 8-9. 7 Johns-Putra, The History of the Epic, 1. i) The history of the epic poem The epic poem, historically, has been the literary genre through which ideas of nationhood have been most notably formed and articulated. Brian Wilkie argues that Virgil’s Aeneid introduced these “moral and political messages” o which were a substantial modification of “Homeric objectivity”. In narrating the foundation of the Roman Empire, The Aeneid is important for establishing the nationalism of the epic mode as Virgil marries the impulses ofThe Odyssey (nostos) and The Iliad (war) in a single narrative. However, as well as establishing the nationalistic strain of the epic poem, Wilkie argues that Virgil created something new in The Aeneid, by introducing the “individualistic...suggesting at almost every moment the presence of its author and his attitudes”.9 Virgil’s poem, Wilkie suggests, firmly establishes the dialectic between the public and the private in the epic mode, positing (as William Rowe has suggested of the epic at large) that “the individual and the collective [are] extensions of one another”.10 In a journal entry from 1957, Charles Olson notes the advantages of the long poem: The advantage of a long poem is [that] like pot au fe u, it creates its own juice..
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