THE NEED

The last act of epic poetry, Americans have long suspected, must create the future, not memorialize the past. Among the rising glories that Brackenridge and Freneau envisioned, even before the Revolution, was the presence of a great indigenous poet:

Shortly after the Peace of Paris, John Adams urged John Trumbull to raise his literary ambitions beyond the Hudibrastic mock epic: “I should hope to live to see our young America in Possession of an Heroic Poem, equal to those the most esteemed in any Country.” In the 1840s, after at least twelve American epic poems had been published, Emerson regretted that “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer.”