“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

How each poet conceives of inheritance is obviously different. For Pound the prevailing
models are economic and aesthetic, for Olson they are archaeological and mythological, and
for Howe they are archival and gendered. How each thinks that a poem can articulate that
inheritance differs as well. For Pound and Olson, the form is a historical epic (as in Pound
stating that an “epic is a poem including history” [LE, 86]), but for Howe the form is a
historical lyric. What the poets share, however, is the assumption that the self is constituted
by history. By exploring the poet’s inheritance, a historical poem reinvents autobiography,
and it is from this perspective that I want to reconsider the great historical poems of the
twentieth century.
Traditional autobiography, by contrast, always requires the self-representation of the
writer. What is surprising is that this requirement has been left largely unquestioned in even
the most advanced studies of autobiography. As one scholar writes, “The limits of
autobiography, multiple and sprawling as they are, might conspire to prevent some self-
representational stories from being told at all if they were subjected to a literal test or
evaluated by certain objective measures.” 3 Here the problem of autobiography is located in
what kind of “self-representational stories” are possible in the context of social restrictions
against unorthodox discourse. However deserving this line of inquiry might prove, it never
questions the necessity of self-representational writing. Even when James Olney proposes an
autobiographical reading of the “Not I” in the work of Samuel Beckett, his position still
depends on autobiography defined by representation of the self in the text. 4 But for avant-
garde poets the limits of autobiography extend far beyond the limits of self-representation.
3 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2001), 14.
4 See his chapter “Not I” in Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: Chicago U P, 1998),
229-270.
2