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

Adams’s work. Borrowing a figure from Michel Foucault, we can say Adams has never been
‘an initiator of discursive practice,’ as were Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. What this means is
that his work never set in motion a series of intellectual and institutional actions that, taken
together, form some sort of ‘-ism’ or ‘science’.” 1 Rather than a widespread following, Adams
attracted individual writers, many of whom, such as R.P. Blackmur, Thomas Pynchon and
Louis Zukofsky, were mavericks in their respective areas. Nor is Adams sufficiently
established and influential that he would dominate the intellectual background of any of the
poets. He is never a mythological figure of authoritative presence, such as for example
Sigismundo Malatesta is for Pound, John Smith and the founders of Gloucester are for
Olson, and Emily Dickinson is (at times) for Howe. However much the Adams family has
been mythologized—including the valorization of John Adams in The Cantos—Henry Adams
is too close to the twentieth century poets to have the necessary aloofness for an
irreproachable mythological figure.
It might be useful to observe that insofar as age difference goes, the consecutive writers
in this study were born at fairly even distances apart. Adams was born in 1838, Pound in
1885, and Howe in 1937. A half century separates Adams from Pound, but a half century
also separates Pound from Howe. Olson, born in 1910, falls midway between Pound and
Howe. Dates of publication for many of the major works by these writers overlap as well.
The Education, though privately printed in 1907, was not available until 1918, when it was
posthumously published. Adams’s late works were coming out around the same time that
1 See Paul A. Bové’s “Abandoning Knowledge: Disciplines, Discourse, Dogma” in New Literary History vol.
25, no. 3. (Summer 1994): 600. Bové also has a book forthcoming on Adams. Until then, see his three essays
and a response, which I refer to below. See “Giving Thought to America: Intellect and The Education of Henry
Adams,” in Critical Inquiry vol. 23, no. 1. (Autumn 1996): 80-108, the response to it by Loren Glass, “Giving
Thought to the Audience: A Response to Paul Bové,” and Bové’s subsequent response to Glass, “Policing
Thought: On Learning How to Read Henry Adams,” both in Critical Inquiry vol. 23, no. 4. (Summer 1996): 933-
946.
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