FRAMEWORK FOR MY LITERARY WORK AS EPIC
The number of long epic poems written the world over is increasing. World history and the history of its many nation states is characterized by epochal statements and epics of various kinds. The Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were both epochal if not epic statements, to choose but two from American history. Then there are epic figures from cinema, like John Wayne and the epic biblical narratives of Cecil B. DeMille. John Wayne directed a film on an epic event, The Alamo. He also wrote a book on the making of this film. He called it The Making of the Epic Film. Epic, it seems, comes up everywhere when one thinks about America and increasingly in relation to all sorts of historical and contemporary events in today’s world. It also comes up in relation to my literary oeuvre, my poetry and the Baha’i Faith. I, like others, though, who tend to draw on the term must be on their guard that they don’t engage in a false sense of what has come to be known recently as triumphalism.
Triumphalism is the attitude or belief that a particular doctrine, religion, culture, social system or, indeed, individual--is superior to and should triumph over all others. Triumphalism is not an articulated doctrine but rather a term that is used to characterize certain attitudes or belief systems by parties such as political commentators and historians. The Age of Triumphalism, one writer notes, has ended. The Age of Muddling Through, that same writer argues, has commenced. In this new era, over which Barack Obama will preside, grandiose ideas will take a back seat to figuring out what actually works and calculating how much we can afford. Whatever: my work has nothing to do with triumphalism in any of its overt or subtle forms inspite of appearances to the contrary. They are only appearances and, if sensed, they have no reality.
In this essay I briefly link the American epic, the Baha'i epic and my own writing which in the years 1997 to 2007 I came to see, to define, as epic, as I have indicated in other places in my writing in recent years. I could very easily, but with much more work, widen the field of epic study to include the Australian, the British or Russian epic among other sources of epic, but I confine myself here due to the necessity for brevity and convenience and due to the critical nature of North America, of Canada and the United States, to the development of Bahá'í history.
Our world and its history is characterized by many epic journeys and voyages, epic battles and wars, epic figures and personalities, inter alia. Calling up all the titles of books from recent decades that contain the word epic in the catalogue of a good library will reveal scores of subjects with epic themes. The same is true on the internet, the most recent source of a myriad epic adventures available at the press of a few keys and clicks. The word epic is now applied indiscriminately to appropriate and inappropriate subjects. Does the story of United Methodist preaching or the study of the genitals of insects properly warrant the label epic? Yes and no. The question, the definition, of epic has become complex. We speak of epic not only in the strict sense of a long poem on certain topics, with certain characteristics more or less based on the founding epics of our Western epic tradition, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. We speak of epic in a broader sense, as a story recounting great deeds, typically in wars or battles or on dangerous voyages or as an application of some aspect of the definition that begins this essay. The use of the term epic has spread out in a burgeoning fashion from these points as I indicated at the outset of this essay.
One is thus not surprised that Robert Hughes’ huge current book on American art, American Visions, is subtitled The Epic History of Art in America. Hughes tells us in a TV interview that the subtitle is the publisher’s. Is the association of epic with things American all just a matter of merchandising, American hype, the spirit of P.T. Barnum? Are we dealing only with the epic of American salesmanship, which almost all foreign visitors to America have commented on, or is there something about America that properly summons up the idea of epic? One would not expect a book on British art, for example, to be subtitled ‘the epic of British art’, though there are of course wonderful buildings, paintings, and sculptures in Britain. Is that only a matter of characteristic British sobriety and discretion, understatement and the stiff upper-lip-? Perhaps.
The Chinese seem to be, as Martin Wright once wrote, too modest and pious to use such a term in relation to their culture. Perhaps. Of course, in this new millennium things are changing. When one rolls the phrase around on one’s tongue, the strong impression cannot be denied that, whatever the crass motives of the publisher of American Visions or of filmmakers who dub many a film epic, epic seems to suit America and American topics better than it suits many, if not most, other countries. Epic becomes, suits, American society and its history–in the sense in which Eugene O'Neill used the term, in his great play, Mourning Becomes Electra. Was his play an epic?
The artist Willem de Kooning who was born, raised, and educated in Holland has an interesting comment on what happens when one sees oneself as American, rather than, say, Dutch. It’s a certain burden, this American-ness. If you come from a small nation, you don’t have that burden. “When I went to the Academy and I was drawing from the nude,” says de Kooning, “I was making the drawing, not Holland. I feel sometimes an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something–a member of a team writing American history.” This does not mean, of course, that all the Dutch people are modest folk. Holland, like all cultures, has its share of the arrogant and those who possess a sense of cultural or personal superiority. Such qualities are universal traits and not confined to nationality or culture.
Certainly Hughes would agree about Aamerica’s epic nature. America’s size, its newness, its wonders engaged many American artists in the nineteenth century. They took up the American landscape not only as a subject but as a duty. In the early twenty-first century, it is still some particular idea of America–today, however, generally evoked satirically, ironically, critically, indignantly–that seems to motivate much of the oversized work of contemporary American artists. And then there is the great American novel, an obsession with some novelists, and the fact that, arguably, America’s greatest poet writes in a grand, elevated style about America. Indeed, his work is labelled by some an epic, as in James Edwin Miller’s Leaves of Grass: Americas Lyric Epic of Self and Democracy.
America as epic raises the question, what is unique, what is central, about the American experience that deserves the epithet epic? It reminds us of another, more sober, effort to get to what is unique about America, the discussion of American exceptionalism and triumphalism conducted principally by sociologists. Seymour Martin Lipset has recently collected and updated a considerable body of his writings on this subject, one that has engaged him for many years: American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. Daniel Bell, a second sociologist, has also mused on the subject of American exceptionalism in his book The End of Ideology and elsewhere. The issue, as they discuss it, arises because of the interesting question of why there has been no major socialist movement in the United States, which makes it unique among advanced industrial societies. I do not want to dwell on this question of political ideology here but, rather, simply allude to the interest of these two major sociologists in this issue of American exceptionalism.
One sometimes reads that the proper subject of epic scope in narrative poetry is the intellectual and spiritual development of the poet: with Milton, Wordsworth or Whitman being good examples and their epic lives replacing the struggles of warriors and swashbucklers as in the epics of ages past. The sequence of Achilles, Rinaldo, Wordsworth or Whitman brings to mind Carlyle's unintentional heroes which begin with the Norse God Odin and end with Samuel Johnson and his Dictionary. For Carlyle the hero was somewhat similar to Aristotle’s "magnanimous" man: a person who flourished in the fullest sense. However, for Carlyle, unlike Aristotle, the world was filled with contradictions with which the hero had to deal.
All heroes have been, are and will be flawed. Heroism so often lays in the creative energy of a person in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection. To sneer at such a person for their failings is the philosophy of those who seek comfort in the conventional. Carlyle called this 'valetism', from the expression 'no man is a hero to his valet.’ But here, too, the epic can flourish. Often moral courage and physical courage go hand in hand as would be the case of members of this sequence of individuals if one examined the epic in history. But history is a very long story and I don’t want to bring too much of it up here for fear of prolixity.
Deeds, inner explorations of feelings, discoveries to improve the lot of man, a plethora of subjects and topics have, thus, all broadened the world of the epic. The proper subject of epic can now be found just about anywhere. Some are troubled by this democratization of the epic. Some literary critics who, after all, are often the first people to discuss what makes an epic, who set up its canons of legitimacy, assert that the purely personal is no subject for epic. Perhaps they are right. I am happy to include my writings and especially my poetry in the category ‘epic’ because it is inspired by and about the history of the Baha’i Faith. Although much of this poetry of mine is personal, it is not only personal. It is also about what is unique, what is special, significant and original about Baha’i history and Baha’i experience. So much of what I am concerned about in this many-coloured epic, the fastidious and laissez-faire aspects on this plane of excellence and the common meeting place of the most diverse personages--participates in one way or another in the concept epic by virtue of its association with the Baha'i Faith.
It is this association with the Baha'i Faith that gives both my own epic narrative and the epic aspects of American history genuine interest to me. I am sure, though, that there would be many critics, both within the Baha'i Faith and without, who would refuse to treat my work as epic. If a typology of epics was considered, was to be drawn up, by critics, mine would not be a primary or secondary epic, but far in the background as a tertiary epic or no epic at all. But still for me, although I make what very well may be a pretentious claim from the point of view of others, there is so much as I have pointed out in a host of placesin my writingsin the last decade, since I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-volunteer work, that gives this work epic prominence.
There is a point of sacredness, indeed many spiritual and intellectual points, in this my epic narrative, my epic poetic; there is a relentless questioning and challenging that lies at the heart of this epic's didactic rhetoric. There is in my work a reflection of the epic history of my Faith. A powerful determinant of my work and its sometimes sentimental ephemera is to be found in the monumental history of my religion and its undoubted epic qualities. Virtually all of my work begins in media res, in the middle of things, and it exists in a vast setting, a vast mise en scene. There are many conventions and expectations in the world of literary epic. I will not dwell on them here.
Like the epic poetry of some other poets, for example, H.D. Doolittle who was writing epic poetry in the years before I was born back in the 1940s, when I was a child and into my teens, my epic poetry has a vast and complex scope, making it difficult for many readers. Like her poetry, though, much of my own work is grounded in the facticity of history. I commend H. D. Doolittle to readers who, in all likelihood, know little or nothing about her.
Much of my work is also grounded in psychological and sociological processes which involve lifting veil after veil of my life and the life of my society and religion to reveal what I perceive to be the meaning of my life, my times and much else as sifted through the teachings of this Faith that came into my life when I was but nine years old when Western civilization stood on the edge of annihalation, a precipice it still sits and dangles on after more than half a century. When one finishes my book, any of my books, if anyone ever does get that far, it is not characters that readers will remember, hopefully not even me, but spiritual emanations which are in reality manifestations or facets of my rational thought, my supervision of existential realities. My peculiar interest is not in surfaces, but in mysterious motivations and in that inner life that does not meet the eye. Like the great poets--Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Blake--I try to say the unsayable. I do not pull the process off anywhere near as effectively as these several geniuses. I look upon existence as a maze of paradoxes, contradictions and enigmas, but I am continually uplifted and renewed by the transient beauty of the world, its meaning and mystery. In many ways, my work has no ending, no more conclusion than world history. The game, the battle, the play, runs for a time, the guests depart, night falls. I go to sleep and stop writing only to begin again the next day.
Walt Whitman, despite his insistence on the purely personal nature of his achievement, incorporated within his poetry the entire American experience of his time. He expressed the view that his life work, his poem Leaves of Grass, has mainly been the outcropping of his own emotional and other personal nature–an attempt, from first to last, to put a person, a human being, himself in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America: freely, fully, and truly on record. Whitman expresses here a determined reference to time and place. And Whitman wrote elsewhere that he contained multitudes within himself and these were the multitudes of America.
As Samuel Beer has argued in his study of Whitman, Whitman reaches out much further into a political community than the typical poet. In my poetry I do the same, but I reach out into the Baha’i community wherever and whenever it exists not especially the American people as Whitman did. Like a mirror, I reflect back the colours of the minds and personalities I have met and the books which I also take under consideration. I have been guided in this exercise by an instinct to create for myself out of whatever odds or ends I can come by, some kind of whole: a portrait of a person, a sketch of an age, a theory of writing, of society and of government, an impression of an embryonic Order at the earliest phase of its existence. After all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, it is I who finally decide here what to write down, what ideas and opinions I want to stress which, insignificant in themselves, I trust will, as Samuel Johnson once said might contribute to so mighty a result.
Wordsworth or any one of a host of poets in the last 200 years in many of the nations of the world and many contemporary non-poets in these same nations, as well as a multitude of other creative people from many walks of life have recorded their personal responses and personal development for all to read. Sometimes they celebrate a nation, its democracy, its multifariousness; sometimes they celebrate, as American art does, its variety and newness. Some of these writers celebrate or commemorate the events of the history of their nation, their group, their homeland or their particular interest group in the same way that I am doing in my poetry and in other literary genres in relation to Baha’i history. Often these writers are quintessentially individualists celebrating not a group but an individual ethos, philosophy, subject or topic of interest to them. One could argue that this is the other epic theme in recent centuries: the theme of the individual and their own special interests, philosophy, values, beliefs and attitudes. Wordsworth’s Prelude is certainly an epic venture and it’s essentially his story; its quintessentially about him.
Many of these same poets and writers of the last 200 years had a political or religious affiliation. All, of course, had some group identity. Everyone belongs to a group in some way or another. The theme of America as epic directs us to think, initially, not about the multiplicity that is America and Americans but of a single dominant story, carried by heroes and the millions of others who are associated with this nation. The traditional epic of America, the epic account that was dominant until at least the 1930s and 1940s, has been in recent decades eclipsed by another and quite different epic of America. It is a multicultural America with a host of separate and yet interconnected epics.
For Baha’is who are also poets or, indeed, prose writers, the epic that arises in their poetry and writings is the history and the culture of their Faith and in the 1930s and 1940s their inherited epic also started to take a different shape as the American Baha'i community expanded to include all of its states. The first Baha'i-American epic, dominant until at least the first teaching Plan(1937-1944) emphasizes the newness, the vastness, the openness of America–the freedom thereby granted Americans. It is the old, or at least the older story, about America. Connected with it are such terms as the American idea, or the American creed, or the American dream, or Manifest Destiny. It is true that the frontier as a continuous line of settlement to the West no longer existed by 1890. It was in the first few years of the 1890s that the first Baha’i pioneers arrived on American shores, precursors of the pioneers who would later leave America’s shores. That first American epic and the epic in Baha’i history associated with the heroic age, one could argue, both lasted into the 1930s when Baha’i administration advanced to assume a form which allowed it to focus on a national, an international teaching Plan. It was here, in this international teaching Plan, that the second stage of the Baha’i epic emerged and, arguably, the second stage of the great American epic as well.
There was still much of the West to be settled even after 1890; there was to come an overseas expansion expressing very much the same values; and then there was the brief American Century, carrying forward similar and related values. The second American epic, which I place in opposition to the first, is a somewhat more problematic epic. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity, whether in an optimistic or pessimistic mood. The first epic was connected with an ever available frontier denoting free land, free institutions, free men. The second epic is significantly city-centred and finds its frontiers, if any, within a physically completed society. The first is the epic of the forests, the prairies, the plains. It is the epic of discoverers, explorers, pioneers, of Columbus, Daniel Boone, and Lewis and Clark, of the Oregon trail, the Mormon trek, the transcontinental railway.
The second phase of the epic story celebrates quite different voyages: the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, the immigrant ship, the underground railway, the tenement trail from slum to suburb. The first is the epic of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scotch-Irish, in lesser degree the German and the Scandinavian. The second is the epic of the Native Americans, the Africans, the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the new immigrants of the last three decades, cast generally as the victims of the protagonists of the first epic.
The first epic has not fully lost its power to evoke response in American consciousness, and the second is not entirely new but has been with us from the beginning, even if hardly noted. From a Baha’i perspective that first American epic could be seen, as I said above, as synonymous with the first stage of the Baha'i epic, the Heroic Age(1844-1932), which lasted, one could argue, until the last and treasured remnant of that age, the Greatest Holy Leaf, died in 1932. Perhaps she is just a bridging figure, but this is not the place to analyse this issue & its many interesting ramifications.
The poet Walt Whitman, among others I could site here, might be seen a bridging figure from the first to the second American epic. He maintains an optimistic stance embracing both. ‘Abdu’l-Baha or the Guardian and/or even the Greatest Holy Leaf serve as bridging figures from this first to the second stage of epic in Baha’i history.
One sees, in the last few decades, a transition in which the first epic, once dominant, becomes recessive, while the second asserts its problematic claims as the epic of America ever more sharply. Here, too, in these same decades the Baha’is, just one group in a host of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith groups, find expression for the epic in which my own life and virtually all the Baha’is now living have been involved. It is here that my poetry finds its place as part of that faith-epic. The second Baha’i epic also asserts its problematic claims in the first epochs of the Formative Age.
The literary genius of Shoghi Effendi colours the landscape of the second stage of this epic. In using the word genius I mean to say that this writer, the man Bahá'ís call the Guardian, possessed gifts that have earned the once-coveted and shining title of genius; he enshrined the spirit of these epochs, of a particular time and place, a type of tutelary deity whose radiance sheds an unflickering, beneficent light within the temple walls of our age. Beginning in the period that we now recall as existing precariously between two major wars, his spirit moved and brought its singular endowments of intelligence, wisdom and exegetical genius to satisfy the needs of the moment and thus serve the future as well as the present..
The Baha’i epic associated with its heroic age, 1844-1921, is not the same as the epic associated with its Formative Age. The potentialities that the creative force of that first 77 years-that heroic age-had planted in human consciousness would gradually unfold in a number of sources, one of which was what the Guardian referred to as the spiritual descendants of the Dawnbreakers. My life and the life of my parents would see the first century of that Formative Age unfold and come to completion or so it appeared at this late hour in that first century of that Formative Age. The poetry I have written, while inspired by that heroic age, is written in the main about the epochs, the four epochs, of my life in the Formative Age.
The ethos and content of this second phase of the Baha'i epic in the years 1921 to 2021 also has within it different stages. By the time my association with the Baha'i Faith began in 1953 or my pioneering life in 1962/3, the Baha'i Faith and its epic features had changed significantly from the first three decades: 1921-1951. These three decades were in many ways hiatus years, years before the first international teaching Plan which took the Cause to over 100 new countries and made it one of the most widespread, if thinly spread, religions on earth. Readers are advised to examine my poetry where issues of this nature and the flowering, the blossoming, of this epic story are examined.
Perhaps the equivalent to this winning of the west in Baha’i literature is Nabis’s book The Dawnbreakers with its thrilling passages and the splendour of its central theme which gives the chronicle its great historic value and its high moral power. Beginning as far back as the mid to late 18th century and continuing with the nine years marking the “most spectacular, most tragic, most eventful period of the first Baha’i century,” this heroic, this apostolic, age ended with the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Baha in 1921. By the time I was born in 1944, Baha’i administration had consolidated into a framework of local and national assemblies and Baha’i teaching Plans began to take on a central focus. The second epic was already taking a specific shape by the time my life began at the outset of the second Baha'i century.
To place the book The Winning of the West in its time: The first volumes were published in 1889 when Roseville was only 31. He had already served as a New York state legislator, had written a well-received book on the War of 1812 and a biography of the frontier statesman Thomas Hart Benton. He had turned himself into a ceaseless advocate of the strenuous life, had ridden with cowboys on cattle ranches in the Dakota Territory on the western frontier when Indian wars were still a reality, and had written a book of his experiences there. That experience led him back to earlier frontiers in American history. As Harvey Wish tells us: The task of writing four volumes of The Winning of the West ... had to share his time and energy while he served as an active member of the United States Civil Service Commission and then as President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners. He investigated slums, sweatshops, and graft.... In 1895-6, he managed to issue his final two volumes while campaigning for McKinley ... for which he was rewarded by receiving the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
I could expatiate on a similar pattern with respect to The Dawnbreakers first published in 1932 and which has gone through many printings since then. Its bulk in one volume sits on the shelves of thousands of Baha'is around the world inspiring them and telling them of a stage in their epic journey, a stage so unlike the one they have been engaged in all their life, except their coreligionists in Iran. Of course, the opening of the towns, localities, states and all the countries of the world to the Baha’i Faith by its pioneers is also a great theme of Baha’i history. And that theme can be found expressed again and again in my poetic-epic, an age of pioneering from the 1920s and 1930s onward throughout my life. My poetry is a work of unabashed religious enthusiasm with its disappointments and discouragements..
Turner had propounded the most influential thesis in American history in 1893. By 1914, he had to take notice of a great change in America: “If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On the streets of ...New York and Boston, the faces we meet are to a surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe.... It is the little Jewish boy, the Greek or Sicilian, who takes the traveller through historic streets, now the home of these newer people ... and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution against oppression.”
In this same address, a commencement speech at the University of Washington, Turner creates a striking image of these two worlds in contact. It seems Turner had to pass through the Harvard museum of social ethics–an early expression of sociology at Harvard which no longer exists–in order to get to the room in which he lectured on the history of the westward movement: The hall is covered with an exhibit of the work of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that centre of American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men ... were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians, struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded life. He writes Huns but presumably means Hungarians.
We will note little reference to African Americans or slavery in Theodore Roosevelt or Frederick Jackson Turner: The epic of the westward movement had little to say of them. Roosevelt did write that the early settlers, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose short-sighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land. But slavery plays no great role in his story: He makes little distinction between the frontiersmen pushing out from Pennsylvania, or from Virginia and the Carolinas, and indeed asserts that they made little distinction. They were all mountain men, and the issue of whether slave or free was of no great moment then. It was before the great conflicts over whether the new western states were to be slave or free. Turner depreciates the significance of slavery as against the significance of the frontier in American history: Even the slavery struggle ... occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to Westward expansion.
This perspective astonishes us today: It is as if once the conflict over whether new states were to be slave or free was settled by the Civil War, race was no longer of great consequence in American history. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th century, the question of race, urgent as it was for black Americans, was little noted by others. If there was an alternative epic to the epic of westward movement, it was then (as in measure it still is) the Civil War and the destruction of southern plantation society, seen entirely from the point of view of the slaveholder. And so, the first great American movie epic is The Birth of a Nation, and two decades later the greatest epic becomes Gone With the Wind.
And yet, there is the quotation from Whitman, and he writes of the prophets of American democracy, that only Emerson glimpsed the real essence of Americanism and its dream of democracy.... Whittier was too concerned with the problem of the slave, and, like Lowell, who would have sacrificed the union because of his dislike of the South, saw America too much in terms of sectional evil. And the muddle only increases. After his criticism, typical of the time, of the new immigrants–and progressives as well as conservatives indulged in it–Adams ends his book with a vision of the American dream and one of these new immigrants dreaming it on the steps of the Boston Public Library:
“That dream ... has evolved from the hearts and burdened souls of many millions, who have come to us from all nations. If some of them have too great faith, we know not yet to what faith may attain, and may hearken to the voice of one of them, Mary Antin, a young immigrant girl who comes to us from Russia.... Sitting on the steps of the Boston Public Library, where the treasures of the whole of human thought had been opened to her, she wrote: This is my latest home, and it invited me to a glad new life.... The past ... cannot hold me, because I have grown too big; just as the little house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of memory, as I move about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid palace.... America is the youngest of nations, and inherits all that went before it in history. And I am the youngest of Americas children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage.... Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.
The number of long epic poems written the world over is increasing. World history and the history of its many nation states is characterized by epochal statements and epics of various kinds. The Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were both epochal if not epic statements, to choose but two from American history. Then there are epic figures from cinema, like John Wayne and the epic biblical narratives of Cecil B. DeMille. John Wayne directed a film on an epic event, The Alamo. He also wrote a book on the making of this film. He called it The Making of the Epic Film. Epic, it seems, comes up everywhere when one thinks about America and increasingly in relation to all sorts of historical and contemporary events in today’s world. It also comes up in relation to my literary oeuvre, my poetry and the Baha’i Faith. I, like others, though, who tend to draw on the term must be on their guard that they don’t engage in a false sense of what has come to be known recently as triumphalism.
Triumphalism is the attitude or belief that a particular doctrine, religion, culture, social system or, indeed, individual--is superior to and should triumph over all others. Triumphalism is not an articulated doctrine but rather a term that is used to characterize certain attitudes or belief systems by parties such as political commentators and historians. The Age of Triumphalism, one writer notes, has ended. The Age of Muddling Through, that same writer argues, has commenced. In this new era, over which Barack Obama will preside, grandiose ideas will take a back seat to figuring out what actually works and calculating how much we can afford. Whatever: my work has nothing to do with triumphalism in any of its overt or subtle forms inspite of appearances to the contrary. They are only appearances and, if sensed, they have no reality.
In this essay I briefly link the American epic, the Baha'i epic and my own writing which in the years 1997 to 2007 I came to see, to define, as epic, as I have indicated in other places in my writing in recent years. I could very easily, but with much more work, widen the field of epic study to include the Australian, the British or Russian epic among other sources of epic, but I confine myself here due to the necessity for brevity and convenience and due to the critical nature of North America, of Canada and the United States, to the development of Bahá'í history.
Our world and its history is characterized by many epic journeys and voyages, epic battles and wars, epic figures and personalities, inter alia. Calling up all the titles of books from recent decades that contain the word epic in the catalogue of a good library will reveal scores of subjects with epic themes. The same is true on the internet, the most recent source of a myriad epic adventures available at the press of a few keys and clicks. The word epic is now applied indiscriminately to appropriate and inappropriate subjects. Does the story of United Methodist preaching or the study of the genitals of insects properly warrant the label epic? Yes and no. The question, the definition, of epic has become complex. We speak of epic not only in the strict sense of a long poem on certain topics, with certain characteristics more or less based on the founding epics of our Western epic tradition, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. We speak of epic in a broader sense, as a story recounting great deeds, typically in wars or battles or on dangerous voyages or as an application of some aspect of the definition that begins this essay. The use of the term epic has spread out in a burgeoning fashion from these points as I indicated at the outset of this essay.
One is thus not surprised that Robert Hughes’ huge current book on American art, American Visions, is subtitled The Epic History of Art in America. Hughes tells us in a TV interview that the subtitle is the publisher’s. Is the association of epic with things American all just a matter of merchandising, American hype, the spirit of P.T. Barnum? Are we dealing only with the epic of American salesmanship, which almost all foreign visitors to America have commented on, or is there something about America that properly summons up the idea of epic? One would not expect a book on British art, for example, to be subtitled ‘the epic of British art’, though there are of course wonderful buildings, paintings, and sculptures in Britain. Is that only a matter of characteristic British sobriety and discretion, understatement and the stiff upper-lip-? Perhaps.
The Chinese seem to be, as Martin Wright once wrote, too modest and pious to use such a term in relation to their culture. Perhaps. Of course, in this new millennium things are changing. When one rolls the phrase around on one’s tongue, the strong impression cannot be denied that, whatever the crass motives of the publisher of American Visions or of filmmakers who dub many a film epic, epic seems to suit America and American topics better than it suits many, if not most, other countries. Epic becomes, suits, American society and its history–in the sense in which Eugene O'Neill used the term, in his great play, Mourning Becomes Electra. Was his play an epic?
The artist Willem de Kooning who was born, raised, and educated in Holland has an interesting comment on what happens when one sees oneself as American, rather than, say, Dutch. It’s a certain burden, this American-ness. If you come from a small nation, you don’t have that burden. “When I went to the Academy and I was drawing from the nude,” says de Kooning, “I was making the drawing, not Holland. I feel sometimes an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something–a member of a team writing American history.” This does not mean, of course, that all the Dutch people are modest folk. Holland, like all cultures, has its share of the arrogant and those who possess a sense of cultural or personal superiority. Such qualities are universal traits and not confined to nationality or culture.
Certainly Hughes would agree about Aamerica’s epic nature. America’s size, its newness, its wonders engaged many American artists in the nineteenth century. They took up the American landscape not only as a subject but as a duty. In the early twenty-first century, it is still some particular idea of America–today, however, generally evoked satirically, ironically, critically, indignantly–that seems to motivate much of the oversized work of contemporary American artists. And then there is the great American novel, an obsession with some novelists, and the fact that, arguably, America’s greatest poet writes in a grand, elevated style about America. Indeed, his work is labelled by some an epic, as in James Edwin Miller’s Leaves of Grass: Americas Lyric Epic of Self and Democracy.
America as epic raises the question, what is unique, what is central, about the American experience that deserves the epithet epic? It reminds us of another, more sober, effort to get to what is unique about America, the discussion of American exceptionalism and triumphalism conducted principally by sociologists. Seymour Martin Lipset has recently collected and updated a considerable body of his writings on this subject, one that has engaged him for many years: American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. Daniel Bell, a second sociologist, has also mused on the subject of American exceptionalism in his book The End of Ideology and elsewhere. The issue, as they discuss it, arises because of the interesting question of why there has been no major socialist movement in the United States, which makes it unique among advanced industrial societies. I do not want to dwell on this question of political ideology here but, rather, simply allude to the interest of these two major sociologists in this issue of American exceptionalism.
One sometimes reads that the proper subject of epic scope in narrative poetry is the intellectual and spiritual development of the poet: with Milton, Wordsworth or Whitman being good examples and their epic lives replacing the struggles of warriors and swashbucklers as in the epics of ages past. The sequence of Achilles, Rinaldo, Wordsworth or Whitman brings to mind Carlyle's unintentional heroes which begin with the Norse God Odin and end with Samuel Johnson and his Dictionary. For Carlyle the hero was somewhat similar to Aristotle’s "magnanimous" man: a person who flourished in the fullest sense. However, for Carlyle, unlike Aristotle, the world was filled with contradictions with which the hero had to deal.
All heroes have been, are and will be flawed. Heroism so often lays in the creative energy of a person in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection. To sneer at such a person for their failings is the philosophy of those who seek comfort in the conventional. Carlyle called this 'valetism', from the expression 'no man is a hero to his valet.’ But here, too, the epic can flourish. Often moral courage and physical courage go hand in hand as would be the case of members of this sequence of individuals if one examined the epic in history. But history is a very long story and I don’t want to bring too much of it up here for fear of prolixity.
Deeds, inner explorations of feelings, discoveries to improve the lot of man, a plethora of subjects and topics have, thus, all broadened the world of the epic. The proper subject of epic can now be found just about anywhere. Some are troubled by this democratization of the epic. Some literary critics who, after all, are often the first people to discuss what makes an epic, who set up its canons of legitimacy, assert that the purely personal is no subject for epic. Perhaps they are right. I am happy to include my writings and especially my poetry in the category ‘epic’ because it is inspired by and about the history of the Baha’i Faith. Although much of this poetry of mine is personal, it is not only personal. It is also about what is unique, what is special, significant and original about Baha’i history and Baha’i experience. So much of what I am concerned about in this many-coloured epic, the fastidious and laissez-faire aspects on this plane of excellence and the common meeting place of the most diverse personages--participates in one way or another in the concept epic by virtue of its association with the Baha'i Faith.
It is this association with the Baha'i Faith that gives both my own epic narrative and the epic aspects of American history genuine interest to me. I am sure, though, that there would be many critics, both within the Baha'i Faith and without, who would refuse to treat my work as epic. If a typology of epics was considered, was to be drawn up, by critics, mine would not be a primary or secondary epic, but far in the background as a tertiary epic or no epic at all. But still for me, although I make what very well may be a pretentious claim from the point of view of others, there is so much as I have pointed out in a host of placesin my writingsin the last decade, since I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-volunteer work, that gives this work epic prominence.
There is a point of sacredness, indeed many spiritual and intellectual points, in this my epic narrative, my epic poetic; there is a relentless questioning and challenging that lies at the heart of this epic's didactic rhetoric. There is in my work a reflection of the epic history of my Faith. A powerful determinant of my work and its sometimes sentimental ephemera is to be found in the monumental history of my religion and its undoubted epic qualities. Virtually all of my work begins in media res, in the middle of things, and it exists in a vast setting, a vast mise en scene. There are many conventions and expectations in the world of literary epic. I will not dwell on them here.
Like the epic poetry of some other poets, for example, H.D. Doolittle who was writing epic poetry in the years before I was born back in the 1940s, when I was a child and into my teens, my epic poetry has a vast and complex scope, making it difficult for many readers. Like her poetry, though, much of my own work is grounded in the facticity of history. I commend H. D. Doolittle to readers who, in all likelihood, know little or nothing about her.
Much of my work is also grounded in psychological and sociological processes which involve lifting veil after veil of my life and the life of my society and religion to reveal what I perceive to be the meaning of my life, my times and much else as sifted through the teachings of this Faith that came into my life when I was but nine years old when Western civilization stood on the edge of annihalation, a precipice it still sits and dangles on after more than half a century. When one finishes my book, any of my books, if anyone ever does get that far, it is not characters that readers will remember, hopefully not even me, but spiritual emanations which are in reality manifestations or facets of my rational thought, my supervision of existential realities. My peculiar interest is not in surfaces, but in mysterious motivations and in that inner life that does not meet the eye. Like the great poets--Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Blake--I try to say the unsayable. I do not pull the process off anywhere near as effectively as these several geniuses. I look upon existence as a maze of paradoxes, contradictions and enigmas, but I am continually uplifted and renewed by the transient beauty of the world, its meaning and mystery. In many ways, my work has no ending, no more conclusion than world history. The game, the battle, the play, runs for a time, the guests depart, night falls. I go to sleep and stop writing only to begin again the next day.
Walt Whitman, despite his insistence on the purely personal nature of his achievement, incorporated within his poetry the entire American experience of his time. He expressed the view that his life work, his poem Leaves of Grass, has mainly been the outcropping of his own emotional and other personal nature–an attempt, from first to last, to put a person, a human being, himself in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America: freely, fully, and truly on record. Whitman expresses here a determined reference to time and place. And Whitman wrote elsewhere that he contained multitudes within himself and these were the multitudes of America.
As Samuel Beer has argued in his study of Whitman, Whitman reaches out much further into a political community than the typical poet. In my poetry I do the same, but I reach out into the Baha’i community wherever and whenever it exists not especially the American people as Whitman did. Like a mirror, I reflect back the colours of the minds and personalities I have met and the books which I also take under consideration. I have been guided in this exercise by an instinct to create for myself out of whatever odds or ends I can come by, some kind of whole: a portrait of a person, a sketch of an age, a theory of writing, of society and of government, an impression of an embryonic Order at the earliest phase of its existence. After all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, it is I who finally decide here what to write down, what ideas and opinions I want to stress which, insignificant in themselves, I trust will, as Samuel Johnson once said might contribute to so mighty a result.
Wordsworth or any one of a host of poets in the last 200 years in many of the nations of the world and many contemporary non-poets in these same nations, as well as a multitude of other creative people from many walks of life have recorded their personal responses and personal development for all to read. Sometimes they celebrate a nation, its democracy, its multifariousness; sometimes they celebrate, as American art does, its variety and newness. Some of these writers celebrate or commemorate the events of the history of their nation, their group, their homeland or their particular interest group in the same way that I am doing in my poetry and in other literary genres in relation to Baha’i history. Often these writers are quintessentially individualists celebrating not a group but an individual ethos, philosophy, subject or topic of interest to them. One could argue that this is the other epic theme in recent centuries: the theme of the individual and their own special interests, philosophy, values, beliefs and attitudes. Wordsworth’s Prelude is certainly an epic venture and it’s essentially his story; its quintessentially about him.
Many of these same poets and writers of the last 200 years had a political or religious affiliation. All, of course, had some group identity. Everyone belongs to a group in some way or another. The theme of America as epic directs us to think, initially, not about the multiplicity that is America and Americans but of a single dominant story, carried by heroes and the millions of others who are associated with this nation. The traditional epic of America, the epic account that was dominant until at least the 1930s and 1940s, has been in recent decades eclipsed by another and quite different epic of America. It is a multicultural America with a host of separate and yet interconnected epics.
For Baha’is who are also poets or, indeed, prose writers, the epic that arises in their poetry and writings is the history and the culture of their Faith and in the 1930s and 1940s their inherited epic also started to take a different shape as the American Baha'i community expanded to include all of its states. The first Baha'i-American epic, dominant until at least the first teaching Plan(1937-1944) emphasizes the newness, the vastness, the openness of America–the freedom thereby granted Americans. It is the old, or at least the older story, about America. Connected with it are such terms as the American idea, or the American creed, or the American dream, or Manifest Destiny. It is true that the frontier as a continuous line of settlement to the West no longer existed by 1890. It was in the first few years of the 1890s that the first Baha’i pioneers arrived on American shores, precursors of the pioneers who would later leave America’s shores. That first American epic and the epic in Baha’i history associated with the heroic age, one could argue, both lasted into the 1930s when Baha’i administration advanced to assume a form which allowed it to focus on a national, an international teaching Plan. It was here, in this international teaching Plan, that the second stage of the Baha’i epic emerged and, arguably, the second stage of the great American epic as well.
There was still much of the West to be settled even after 1890; there was to come an overseas expansion expressing very much the same values; and then there was the brief American Century, carrying forward similar and related values. The second American epic, which I place in opposition to the first, is a somewhat more problematic epic. It emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity, whether in an optimistic or pessimistic mood. The first epic was connected with an ever available frontier denoting free land, free institutions, free men. The second epic is significantly city-centred and finds its frontiers, if any, within a physically completed society. The first is the epic of the forests, the prairies, the plains. It is the epic of discoverers, explorers, pioneers, of Columbus, Daniel Boone, and Lewis and Clark, of the Oregon trail, the Mormon trek, the transcontinental railway.
The second phase of the epic story celebrates quite different voyages: the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, the immigrant ship, the underground railway, the tenement trail from slum to suburb. The first is the epic of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scotch-Irish, in lesser degree the German and the Scandinavian. The second is the epic of the Native Americans, the Africans, the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the new immigrants of the last three decades, cast generally as the victims of the protagonists of the first epic.
The first epic has not fully lost its power to evoke response in American consciousness, and the second is not entirely new but has been with us from the beginning, even if hardly noted. From a Baha’i perspective that first American epic could be seen, as I said above, as synonymous with the first stage of the Baha'i epic, the Heroic Age(1844-1932), which lasted, one could argue, until the last and treasured remnant of that age, the Greatest Holy Leaf, died in 1932. Perhaps she is just a bridging figure, but this is not the place to analyse this issue & its many interesting ramifications.
The poet Walt Whitman, among others I could site here, might be seen a bridging figure from the first to the second American epic. He maintains an optimistic stance embracing both. ‘Abdu’l-Baha or the Guardian and/or even the Greatest Holy Leaf serve as bridging figures from this first to the second stage of epic in Baha’i history.
One sees, in the last few decades, a transition in which the first epic, once dominant, becomes recessive, while the second asserts its problematic claims as the epic of America ever more sharply. Here, too, in these same decades the Baha’is, just one group in a host of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith groups, find expression for the epic in which my own life and virtually all the Baha’is now living have been involved. It is here that my poetry finds its place as part of that faith-epic. The second Baha’i epic also asserts its problematic claims in the first epochs of the Formative Age.
The literary genius of Shoghi Effendi colours the landscape of the second stage of this epic. In using the word genius I mean to say that this writer, the man Bahá'ís call the Guardian, possessed gifts that have earned the once-coveted and shining title of genius; he enshrined the spirit of these epochs, of a particular time and place, a type of tutelary deity whose radiance sheds an unflickering, beneficent light within the temple walls of our age. Beginning in the period that we now recall as existing precariously between two major wars, his spirit moved and brought its singular endowments of intelligence, wisdom and exegetical genius to satisfy the needs of the moment and thus serve the future as well as the present..
The Baha’i epic associated with its heroic age, 1844-1921, is not the same as the epic associated with its Formative Age. The potentialities that the creative force of that first 77 years-that heroic age-had planted in human consciousness would gradually unfold in a number of sources, one of which was what the Guardian referred to as the spiritual descendants of the Dawnbreakers. My life and the life of my parents would see the first century of that Formative Age unfold and come to completion or so it appeared at this late hour in that first century of that Formative Age. The poetry I have written, while inspired by that heroic age, is written in the main about the epochs, the four epochs, of my life in the Formative Age.
The ethos and content of this second phase of the Baha'i epic in the years 1921 to 2021 also has within it different stages. By the time my association with the Baha'i Faith began in 1953 or my pioneering life in 1962/3, the Baha'i Faith and its epic features had changed significantly from the first three decades: 1921-1951. These three decades were in many ways hiatus years, years before the first international teaching Plan which took the Cause to over 100 new countries and made it one of the most widespread, if thinly spread, religions on earth. Readers are advised to examine my poetry where issues of this nature and the flowering, the blossoming, of this epic story are examined.
Perhaps the equivalent to this winning of the west in Baha’i literature is Nabis’s book The Dawnbreakers with its thrilling passages and the splendour of its central theme which gives the chronicle its great historic value and its high moral power. Beginning as far back as the mid to late 18th century and continuing with the nine years marking the “most spectacular, most tragic, most eventful period of the first Baha’i century,” this heroic, this apostolic, age ended with the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Baha in 1921. By the time I was born in 1944, Baha’i administration had consolidated into a framework of local and national assemblies and Baha’i teaching Plans began to take on a central focus. The second epic was already taking a specific shape by the time my life began at the outset of the second Baha'i century.
To place the book The Winning of the West in its time: The first volumes were published in 1889 when Roseville was only 31. He had already served as a New York state legislator, had written a well-received book on the War of 1812 and a biography of the frontier statesman Thomas Hart Benton. He had turned himself into a ceaseless advocate of the strenuous life, had ridden with cowboys on cattle ranches in the Dakota Territory on the western frontier when Indian wars were still a reality, and had written a book of his experiences there. That experience led him back to earlier frontiers in American history. As Harvey Wish tells us: The task of writing four volumes of The Winning of the West ... had to share his time and energy while he served as an active member of the United States Civil Service Commission and then as President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners. He investigated slums, sweatshops, and graft.... In 1895-6, he managed to issue his final two volumes while campaigning for McKinley ... for which he was rewarded by receiving the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
I could expatiate on a similar pattern with respect to The Dawnbreakers first published in 1932 and which has gone through many printings since then. Its bulk in one volume sits on the shelves of thousands of Baha'is around the world inspiring them and telling them of a stage in their epic journey, a stage so unlike the one they have been engaged in all their life, except their coreligionists in Iran. Of course, the opening of the towns, localities, states and all the countries of the world to the Baha’i Faith by its pioneers is also a great theme of Baha’i history. And that theme can be found expressed again and again in my poetic-epic, an age of pioneering from the 1920s and 1930s onward throughout my life. My poetry is a work of unabashed religious enthusiasm with its disappointments and discouragements..
Turner had propounded the most influential thesis in American history in 1893. By 1914, he had to take notice of a great change in America: “If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On the streets of ...New York and Boston, the faces we meet are to a surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe.... It is the little Jewish boy, the Greek or Sicilian, who takes the traveller through historic streets, now the home of these newer people ... and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution against oppression.”
In this same address, a commencement speech at the University of Washington, Turner creates a striking image of these two worlds in contact. It seems Turner had to pass through the Harvard museum of social ethics–an early expression of sociology at Harvard which no longer exists–in order to get to the room in which he lectured on the history of the westward movement: The hall is covered with an exhibit of the work of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that centre of American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men ... were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians, struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded life. He writes Huns but presumably means Hungarians.
We will note little reference to African Americans or slavery in Theodore Roosevelt or Frederick Jackson Turner: The epic of the westward movement had little to say of them. Roosevelt did write that the early settlers, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose short-sighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land. But slavery plays no great role in his story: He makes little distinction between the frontiersmen pushing out from Pennsylvania, or from Virginia and the Carolinas, and indeed asserts that they made little distinction. They were all mountain men, and the issue of whether slave or free was of no great moment then. It was before the great conflicts over whether the new western states were to be slave or free. Turner depreciates the significance of slavery as against the significance of the frontier in American history: Even the slavery struggle ... occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to Westward expansion.
This perspective astonishes us today: It is as if once the conflict over whether new states were to be slave or free was settled by the Civil War, race was no longer of great consequence in American history. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th century, the question of race, urgent as it was for black Americans, was little noted by others. If there was an alternative epic to the epic of westward movement, it was then (as in measure it still is) the Civil War and the destruction of southern plantation society, seen entirely from the point of view of the slaveholder. And so, the first great American movie epic is The Birth of a Nation, and two decades later the greatest epic becomes Gone With the Wind.
And yet, there is the quotation from Whitman, and he writes of the prophets of American democracy, that only Emerson glimpsed the real essence of Americanism and its dream of democracy.... Whittier was too concerned with the problem of the slave, and, like Lowell, who would have sacrificed the union because of his dislike of the South, saw America too much in terms of sectional evil. And the muddle only increases. After his criticism, typical of the time, of the new immigrants–and progressives as well as conservatives indulged in it–Adams ends his book with a vision of the American dream and one of these new immigrants dreaming it on the steps of the Boston Public Library:
“That dream ... has evolved from the hearts and burdened souls of many millions, who have come to us from all nations. If some of them have too great faith, we know not yet to what faith may attain, and may hearken to the voice of one of them, Mary Antin, a young immigrant girl who comes to us from Russia.... Sitting on the steps of the Boston Public Library, where the treasures of the whole of human thought had been opened to her, she wrote: This is my latest home, and it invited me to a glad new life.... The past ... cannot hold me, because I have grown too big; just as the little house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of memory, as I move about at will in the wide spaces of this splendid palace.... America is the youngest of nations, and inherits all that went before it in history. And I am the youngest of Americas children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage.... Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.
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