Some of the most important poets of the 20^th century– Pound, Zukofksy, HD, Walcott– wrote works that they self-consciously considered to be “epic.” For Pound, this kind of poem always aspired to be the “tale of the tribe;” and many critics have placed the efforts towards the modernist and post-modernist epos in the tradition of “national” poetry in the nineteenth century. But works like The Cantos, A, or Helen in Egypt look back beyond modernity to classical sources. They find in the works of Homer and Dante certain models for how a poem should articulate the nexus of social plenitude and individual experience. The problem for them is how a genre like this might exist in a world of such intense social fragmentation.

This problem emerges from a very particular reading of classical and medieval epic. The twentieth-century bards were heavily influenced by the Romantic reception of the epic; particularly the Hegelian idea that such poetry was appropriate only for an integral or substantial society, in which law and the individual will were yet to be prised apart. This theory was taken up by Lukacs in his theory of the novel, and has remained a keystone of reception for the modern epic. While critical antiquarians have pointed out that such a vision misrepresents the social complexity of the Greek and Roman worlds, such a misrepresentation remained critically important for modern writers. These poets found in the ancient visions of a social totality a sort of speculative unity towards which they might aim, as a corrective for a world violently divided by class.

In this paper, I want to reconstruct the lineage of the Romantic and post-romantic theory of epic, and show how it operates in one of the major works of modern poetry: Pound’s Cantos. I want to show the ways that Pound tries and fails to overcome what he perceived as the divisions of politics and experience in what we might call the “classical age of class struggle”– the interwar period. I then want to read forward to look at a couple of contemporary Australian writers, whose anti-epics work to contextualise the failures of the modernists like Pound, and raise the question of whether a “tale” can really be told of a “tribe” like our own.