Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T16:06:26.588Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Prospect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2010

Get access

Summary

Halfway through Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), beleaguered bond king Sherman McCoy listens absentmindedly to an afterdinner speech at a desperately fashionable Fifth Avenue dinner party. The speaker and guest of honor, a haggard British poet named Lord Aubrey Buffing, who is reputed to have been on the short list for the Nobel Prize, tries to strike a tone of light-hearted confession:

The United States deserve an epic poem. At various times in my career I considered writing an epic, but I didn't do that either. Poets are also not supposed to write epics any longer, despite the fact that the only poets who have endured and will endure are poets who have written epics…. No, we poets no longer even have the courage to make rhymes, and the American epic should have rhymes, rhyme on top of rhyme in a shameless cascade, rhymes of the sort that Edgar Allan Poe gave us.

Wolfe's mockery of a rhymed epic for contemporary America is inseparable from his recognition that the demand for one has somehow, ludicrously, lingered on. Lord Buffing's mention of Poe, however, suddenly turns his speech in a quite different direction. Buffing speaks of “The Masque of the Red Death” as a prophetic allegory of the contemporary pleasure whirl, which is likely to end in the death of Prospero and his self-immured seekers of oblivion. After acknowledging “I cannot be the epic poet you deserve. I am too old and far too tired, too weary of the fever called ‘living’ ” (356). Lord Buffing sits down, leaving the room to an intruder named Silence who prevails because the guests are momentarily anxious that they might not have understood something possibly profound.

On one level, Lord Aubrey Buffing serves as the barely standing proof that Poe's strictures against the contemporary epic were entirely correct. An epic poem on America means nothing to any guest present, none of whom could be imagined to exist in such a poem.

Type
Chapter
Information
The American Epic
Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860
, pp. 238 - 242
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×