To create some kind of heroic song for the New World remained a pressing cultural need from the time the Republic was formed until the time it was severed, yet the history of this initially embarrassing quest has not yet been written. This neglect is not justified, but it has surely been understandable. Readers with New Critical assumptions about literary art have scarcely been able to endure the poems of Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow. No one, to my knowledge, has yet even considered the many later attempts to wrench a “Homeric” verse epic out of American experience. Dogged patience is sometimes needed to read them; to write about them depletes one's resources of humor. Moreover, much of the debate over the substance and style of the American epic was carried on in literary periodicals that appeared, and usually foundered, between the Revolution and the Civil War. As long as the American epic is seen as a closed couplet cul-de-sac, a cemetery for long patriotic poems, the debate cannot seem worth the exhumation.

I shall contend that the American epic did not expire in the first quarter of the nineteenth century only to be revived, in troublingly imagistic form, by such dissimilar poets as Pound, Crane, and Williams a century later. The disgrace of the imitative verse epic led authors to portray American heroic subjects in new literary forms more engaging to contemporary readers. If we mercifully except Hiawatha, Whitman's Leaves of Grass is still the one work commonly believed to have fulfilled this end. Perhaps now, however, America's heroic leaves might be looked for under someone else's bootsoles.