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

followed the poetic forms of T.S. Eliot and W. H. Auden even well-after WWII, “the careers
of the inheritors were too often ‘literary,’ resting the idea of literature itself on a fixed notion
of poetry & poem, which might be improved upon but never questioned at the root.” 22
Similarly, inheritance betokens an obstacle to formal innovation when Olson calls for
“COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is
the ‘old’ base of the non-projective” (SW, 16).
It might surprise us that historical poets want to reach outside of history, to a “FIELD,”
an “unfilled space,” or, as Olson writes during his investigation of Mayan culture, “the
substances of history now useful lie outside, under, right here, anywhere but in the direct
continuum of society as we have had it…” (SW, 84). It is necessary to see that that this space
is not ahistorical so much as a gesture to events or people that have never been subsumed in
an official record and hence remain outside our knowledge of the past and unavailable to the
conceptual resources that allow us to think about inheritance. Only from this perspective
does it make sense to talk about inheritance in works by Pound, Olson, and Howe. They
each want an inheritance that goes beyond or beneath our received inheritance. To reach
“outside” exposes received inheritance to its shortcomings—but then it enables the
founding of an alternative, more open inheritance which has yet to be codified. Howe cites
such an inheritance when she says, “Here is unappropriated autonomy. Uncounted occupied
space. No covenant of King and people. No centralized State. Heavy pressure of finding no
content. Openers of the breach.” (BM, 49). This “Here” has the promise of unforeseen
initiative in an open space. The idea is that inheritance of the conventional kind—at it is
imposed by textbooks, national holidays, famous men and so forth—never accounts for
22 See his preface to Revolution of the Word (1974) in Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-faces & Other Writings (New
York: New Directions, 1981), 101.
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