A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

language poets in their early theorizations of the open text. She objects particularly to the epiphanic mode’s “smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth” (Hejinian 2000, p. 41).

The specific terminology of epiphany is more likely to appear in summative assessments of language poetry in hindsight than in its founding manifestoes, a pattern that reflects the consolidation of the term “epiphanic” over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as a pejorative shorthand for disingenuous literary affectation, aesthetic closure, stylistic conservatism, bourgeois self-expression, and facile aggrandizement of the banal—features that oppositional poets of the period identified closely with the lyric poetry against which they defined their own artistic forms and purposes. The status of “epiphanic” as a dirty word is thus integrally bound up with evolving conceptions of lyric over the past several decades—with the “super-sizing” of the genre that Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have called “lyricization” (Jackson and Prins 2014, pp. 5, 7), with the related phenomenon of widespread remonstration against the “mainstream” lyric in avant-garde rhetoric and practice, and with the subsequent emergence of a pervasive sense of “lyric shame,” as Gillian White calls it, a situation in which the sudden, profound insight emerges as perhaps the most embarrassing of the lyric’s signature conventions, leading poets to “[flinch] from their own epiphanic inclinations, and the forms of subjectivity these produce” (White 2014, p. 232). The polemics of taste and value surrounding epiphany invite us to ask what forms revelatory experience can now acceptably take in a poem and to what ends; to answer those questions in turn requires reckoning with the cultural power the epiphanic mode has wielded in its canonical formations and how that power has come to inflect its creative possibilities for poets in the wake of resounding critiques. A diverse array of poets have recently shown that epiphany need not produce lyric subjectivity, and that the epiphanic mode—capable of grounding the poem in impersonal forces of language, history, and structures of power rather than in the transcendental consciousness of an expressive subject—is a more neutral representational technique than disparaging appraisals have allowed. What kinds of poems does the oppositional narrative surrounding the epiphanic lyric leave out, and how have experimentalists themselves leveraged the epiphanic to enlarge their claims for the formal strategies they espouse? Are epiphanies really obsolete?

Though today’s nearly inextricable association of epiphany with lyric in critical discourse could be said to culminate in 2009 with Cole Swensen’s canonization of the term “mainstream epiphanic lyric” (Swenson and John 2009, p. xx) in American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, the association begins to be formalized in the structuralist criticism of the mid-twentieth century. It is in fact a literary critic, Northrop Frye, who coins the adjective “epiphanic” in 1951 to describe a modal disposition of lyric specifically, a constitutive affiliation that had not been present in other influential post-Romantic definitions of lyric poetry as the “the self-expression of the subjective life” (Hegel 1975, p. 1038), as “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude” (Mill 1860, p.18), or as the “voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody” (Eliot 1953, p. 106). In hindsight, Frye sets many of the terms for subsequent discussion of epiphany in postwar American poetics and beyond. Like Pound, who identifies the concision of the imagist poem with its capacity to induce “sudden liberation” and “freedom from time limits and space limits,” Frye identifies the distinctive temporal profile of the epiphanic moment—“the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time”—with the ephemerality of lyric, suggesting a fundamental congruence between the paradoxical temporality of the sudden and timeless epiphany and the paradoxical temporality of the lyric that commits ephemeral experience to stasis in textual form. Frye’s terminology also emphasizes the ancient Greek and subsequently Christian associations of epiphany with the manifestation of the divine, associations that come to freight the epiphanic mode with the residues of Christian metaphysics and ideology. Setting up the fundamental premises of his archetypal criticism, Frye writes that the literary critic must first study sacred scriptures, since “After he has understood their structure, then he can descend from archetypes to genres, and see how the drama emerges from the ritual side of myth and lyric from the epiphanic or fragmented side” (Frye 1951, pp. 103, 105). If ritual is collective, communal, and unfolding, the epiphanic is solitary and sudden, a fragment of consciousness suited to both the scale of lyric poetry and the expressive circumstances of conventional lyric speakership. Frye also consistently applies the term to Romantic poetry, grounding his concept of the “Romantic epiphanic” (176) mode in the personal, meditative lyricism of Wordsworth and Keats. Other influential critics and theorists, particularly M.H. Abrams and Jonathan Culler, reinforced and naturalized the association between the epiphanic-as-mode and the lyric-as-genre in the 1960s and 1970s.¹

Influenced by this epiphanic turn in mid-century lyric theory, the entangled and mutually reinforcing discourses of language poetry and literary criticism dedicated to its analysis have presented an array of critiques of the ‘epiphany poem’ in American poetry that generations of poets and scholars have now echoed and expanded. Marjorie Perloff introduces the term in 1971, applying it approvingly to James Wright, specifically: “Wright is at his best,” she writes, “when he writes what we might call the ‘epiphany poem’—a brief lyric in which contemplation of the external landscape suddenly gives way to insight into the world beyond” (Perloff 1973, pp. 128–129). Over the course of the subsequent decade, however, Perloff’s influential characterizations of the epiphanic become more disparaging. Wright’s epiphany poems appear ever more retrograde “from our vantage point in the eighties,” she writes, “best understood as…late variant[s] of the paradigmatic modernist lyric as that lyric has come down to poets like both Wright and Lowell from Emily Dickinson or Yeats or Stevens or Frost or Roethke.” By contrast, Frank O’Hara’s contemporaneous “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” which Perloff characterizes as an (anti-)narrative poem rather than a lyric (“the equation of poetry with the lyric is almost axiomatic in contemporary criticism,” she laments), looks presciently forward; for O’Hara, the postmodernist avant la lettre, “the world just doesn’t—indeed shouldn’t—make sense, [and] the gnosis which is narration remains fragmentary. By frustrating our desire for closure…such ‘stories’ foreground the narrative codes themselves and call them into question” (Perloff 1982, p. 412, 415, 417). For Perloff, the “paradigmatic modernist lyric” and the “epiphany poem” present none of these salutary frustrations or deferrals of resolution. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, the epiphany appears obsolescent on different terms, because it is ubiquitous and false; Perloff praises John Ashbery in particular for “cast[ing] a cold eye on the seemingly endless round of epiphanies his contemporaries say they are experiencing” [Perloff 1981, p. 252, italics mine]). In her insightful assessment of the “abjection of ‘lyric’” (White 2014, p. 26) during the last decades of the twentieth century, Gillian White draws out the tacit politics of Perloff’s deeply influential characterization of the epiphany poem specifically; Perloff, she writes, “identifies it as a technique of the ‘logocentric universe,’ of Cartesian ideology, one that emphasizes the ‘centrality of persons’ and is thus deeply out of tune with any politics concerned with intersubjectivity and community. Seeds of this critique, which Perloff drew from her readings of Language writing…offered to a broad academic audience a version of lyric whose coherence depended on its abstract function as an antitype” (White 2014, p. 218).

      As White’s observation about the political valences of the epiphanic “antitype” suggests, the narrowly aesthetic and philosophical charges against epiphany—charges of reductive closure, clichéd corniness, oracular affectation, and a naive conception of poetic voice as a transparent reflection of inner life unadulterated by the tacit imperatives and distortions of language itself—soon gave way to explicitly political critiques directed toward the epiphanic mode’s putative valorization of bourgeois subjectivity and cultivation of an authoritative ethos of mastery. These critiques, abetted by the perception of epiphany as the signature of an aesthetically dominant “mainstream” poetic tradition descended from Romantic forebears, consolidated the reputation of the epiphanic lyric as the consummate literary embodiment of willfully naïve, repressive normativity. In 1992, Rae Armantrout