Selections from
The Egress of Hell:
An Epic Poem in Twenty-Four Books
By Edwin Brent Wilcoxson, M.A. (Lit), M.A. (Hist), Ph.D., Litt. D.
(some Time recently deceased)
From “The Prologue”
Ye Gods and Little Godlets! I had thought
This place to roil in umbrous shadow, burn
With everlasting flames beyond all hope
Or comprehension!
I had not thought to greet
Eternal dullness—walls, as eyeless as
Great Samson Gaza-bound in servile sloth;
Unending paths that dissipate with each
Unending breath, trending nowhere, nowhere
Born; thick, glaucous air that chokes and withers—
Dullness, dullness, nothing bright or light
Or white… except one parchment sheet penned
With sloven haste—as if to speak to me
Were waste of time and space and thoughts and words.
A single leaf, translucent as the outmost
Film of skin that mottles morbid flesh:
“For Egress—Simply write a Perfect Poem .”
(Ll. 1-16 of 666)
From “Canto the First”
Of my Captivity in boundless Hell
I sing—or rather shriek!— as though a thousand
Harpies battened on my ectoplasmic
Core were ripping through my essence, starved
For fat and meat and blood-chocked nourishment.
I sing, and as I do I call upon
The ancient, voiceless Gods that once attended
Epic Poetry to aid me in
My thus-far ineffective quest—
To Get me out of Hell! God knows I’ve tried:
Earnest Ballads by the double-score,
Quatrained, heartfelt, broken-hearted songs
Of Love and Loss, Beatitude in country
Lanes, rhymed and timed to excellence—
And to no avail. They earned a memo
Not unlike the first…and I began again.
This time, Sestinas—complex, intricate—
Single, Double, Triple Quatrifold,
Incessant repetons on Death and Hell,
On Justice, Mercy, Love, on Suffering
And Guilt… And Pain— the Pain illimitless
Of standing non-existent hour upon
Non-existent hour at this crude desk
To scratch unworthiness on never-ending
Reams.
The pain… the pain!
Then—wretched—more
And more and more beyond all count in this
Benighted place where Time not only Is,
But Was, and must Become—yet all at once,
All Present, Past; all Future, once-has-been:
Shrill stratum over stratum, till they quash
And suffocate Potential, Faith, and Hope
Without improving Hell. In grief, I turned
To Petrarch’s favored form, his fourteen lines
Of metered verse, with rhyme and constant rhythm
Lush and yet—opposing—capable
Of strict and stern Philosophy. And by
The tens, the scores, the hundreds, I composed
Satanic Sonnets to bemoan, bewail,
Complain, exhort, demand, beseech…in fine,
To end my presence in this damnéd Place,
And in return received one calm command:
“For Egress—Simply Write a Perfect Poem!”
What then was left when else had failed? That last,
That most ambitious, enervating, and
Sublime in all of Poesy: the Epic—
Its majestic sweep; its Fabled Tale; Heroes,
Heroines at once full human, at once
Competitors with Gods Themselves; its Style,
So High and Grand that lesser tongues might only
Look, and speak, and hear, and weep, and wish
(In vain, oh yes, in vain !) that they might merely
Imitate its lowest ranges, foothills
Braced by heights beyond their aspirations,
Forever wreathed in coronets of Fire,
Indwelt by Souls supernal, endlessly.
Of course! The leaden dullness of this Place
Had spread its sluggish tendrils to my brain,
Concealed from me my Task, my Destiny:
That I, an Orpheus Revived, should stand
Before the regnant King of Hell and sing
My freedom, as once Apollo’s Son sang life
For fair Eurydice, should pluck my Lyre and
Draw iron tears down Pluto’s stolid cheek
And make Hell grant what I profoundly seek,
A thing not yet achieved in Prose or Rhyme.
An Epic, then, recounting punishments
Austere, excessive, and unfair for minor
Flaws—no more than foibles , truth be told—
Accountable not mine but of my art,
My talent, genius, and creative grace…
Sufficient to erase my condemnation,
Satisfy my so-obsessive Judge’s
Distorted sense of Wrong and Right. And thus….
To begin, I shall declaim the true Descent
Of those I take—invoke—to guide my Words,
My Muses, some unnamed save by the works
They penned; some named by hallowed names that echo
Through high Halls of Immortality;
All elevate by virtue of their strength
Of line, their grandeur and heroic scope.
One by one, from first to last (that would,
Of course, be me ), none left behind in shade,
I shall recite their greatness and their roles
In shaping wayward human Destiny.
Say first, thou ancient poet who inscribed
“When From on High” and erst gave form to Earth
And Life and Man through lofty Marduk’s power,
Enûma Eliš, whose thousand lines incised
In clay survive—though by whose hand no scholar
Knows—to chant…
(Ll. 1-90)
‘First Teacher’ Homer, in Virtue first, but later
In chronology, the first to sing
The ancient tales of Greece, and thence to mold
Great Thoughts, through Greater Rome and yet beyond,
The first to sing Achilles’ manic wrath
And Trojan desolation obligate…
(Ll. 5,420-5,426)
From “Canto the Fourth”
Mantuan Virgil wrote in perfect verse,
Or so assert staid, bearded scholars from
The Renaissance, who firmly—resolutely—
Brought deadly polish to the living mode,
Obstructed it with “Thus ye must!” and “Thou
Shalt not!” until it seemed as fat and scant
Of breath as I perceive myself to be
In Hell—but that empyreal Poet, Master
Of all Masters-Yet-to-Be (except
For… no, since modesty forfends!) refused
To see perfection in his final Tale,
Instructed that pious Æneas and his ships
And men redeemed by Fate from Troyan fires—
And all his hopes of founding beyond his death
The Glory that was Rome—he, noble Poet,
Gave commands, and all smiles stopped together
When his Testament condemned his words to flames
For want (the tales tell) of proper vowel-quantities
And metered dance. He knew well enough. Now all
That I must do is to out-Virgil Virgil.
But think! before the mighty Bard
Dared touch his pen to scroll, before he dared
Approach the August Majesty of Homer’s
Legacy, he first composed his simple
Shepherds’ songs, Bucolics named, to learn…
(Ll. 89-113)
From “Canto the Sixth”
To that ancient Isle, from Geatland,
The doughty champion, Beowulf, impelled
His way to meet his tri-fold Destiny—
Grendel, huge of bulk and appetite,
Who slaughtered thirty warriors, just to fall
Before the might of one whose robust grip
Equaled in its strength a matching sum;
Grendel’s Dam, so thirsting for revenge
That she must kill her offspring’s slaughterer
Or be herself by Hruntung ’s edge dispatched;
The Fire-Drake, heinous dragon-shape
That lured the agéd king with burning lust
And golden dreams to leave his honored throne
In quest of greater glory. Oh! that he
Had restrained himself, brought surcease to…
(Ll. 9,987-10,001)
From “Canto the Twelfth”
Of him I will not sing, who so illy limned
These straitened corridors, whose hero-Lord
Might take my words amiss…of him, then naught…
(Ll. 6,529-6,531)
From “Canto the Sixteenth”
…Which yet again reminds,
“For Egress— Simply Write a Perfect Poem! ”—
Once more my theme encroaches on my thoughts
And I must conjure nearer Muses, nearer
Me in Time and Space, to indicate
The trenched futility of such a charge.
“Write a perfect poem!” indeed! as if
Perfection protocols were scribed on stone
In some forgotten warren I must pierce,
Conventions, Rules, Proprieties to be
Ticked off some Celestial Clipboard till
Each tiny box reports success… voilà
(One might as well resort to Hwæt! or Lo!
Or any other bland banality
Long since used up and cast aside as stale)
A Perfect Poem ! Bah! A waste of Time!
If Time were ought to waste in this vast, gloomy
Pit. More modern masters—evading overt
Epic while aspiring to its magnitude in crippled,
Cryptic lines of Libre Vers— achieved
Their Masterworks to live beyond their deaths:
Eliot’s anti-epic, mocking, brittle;
Mad Pound’s pronouncements, oracular and vague;
Williams’ finely chosen words; and more—
Olson, Jones, Zukofsky, Tolkien, and their
Multiforms in Rhyme and Prose; the other
Williams’ romp through Logres-Land: all
‘Perfect’ in their type… but none has yet
Explained wherein perfection—’completion,’
‘Finishing’—might dwell. And all they had
To lose were worldly plaudits and acclaim.
But I, I have in jeopardy my soul
And where…
(Ll. 456-487)
…must not forget the novels
—someone is watching me i dont know who
or how or why or where but i can feel a
prickling on my neck it is not HIM
i would know his icy gaze but someone
else and im afraid afraid— Titanic
Tales of other Worlds of other Whens
And Wheres where different Laws and different…
(Ll. 8,720-8,727)
From “Canto the Twentieth”
Is anybody there? Does anybody
Care? I write as with my own life’s blood—
It might be so, I can no longer tell—but wonder
From the easy quickness of replies
(“For Egress— Simply Write a Perfect Poem! )
If anybody’s eyes—imagined eyes or real—
Have ever scanned my lines. Do I write
For Him Below to read and think about;
Or Him Above to know already what
And who I am and judge me so? What
Is the point? Why tantalize? Why torture me
With Words, Words, Words, Words and nothing
More…
(Ll. 320-322)
From “Canto the Twenty-Second”
…harder and harder and harder
To fill a quarter-million lines. Inane
Ideas keep popping up, like giving names
To every crack on my chamber floor—one looks
Insanely like a “Frederick” and another
Reminds me vaguely of a great-aunt Annie
Who died when I was three—I’m fairly sure
That just a list of names won’t work. Perhaps
A new direction, after all He must
Be just as tired as I am of this stuff.
A desperate poet named Brent
Strained his poor brain to invent—
To get out of Hell
He must Poem so well
That the Devil would grant his Ascent.
No, probably not. And anyway I
Don’t see how that would lead toward a—ahem!—
Perfect Poem! So I will…
(Ll. 8,752-8,765—or 8,770, I’m not sure.)
From “Canto the Twenty-Fourth”
The End The End The End The End The End
The End The End The End The End The End
The End The End The End The End The End
The End The End The End The End The End
The End The End The End The End The End
The End The End The End The End The End
The end the end the end the end the end
The end the end the end the end the end
The end the end the end the end the end
Theendtheendtheendtheendtheend
theendtheendtheendtheendtheend
theendtheendtheendtheendtheend
theendtheendtheendtheendtheend
theendtheendogodtheendtheend
(Ll. 12,614-12,624)
[Following Wilcoxson’s submission of his finished epic, this hand-scrawled note appeared on his writing board:
For Egress, Simply Write a Perfect Poem!
with the addendum:
For Hell’s Sake,
Think about it this time!
—The Management]
Canto the Twenty-Fifth
How egress Hell? One
White Rose… envelopes its thorns—
A perfect poem
[Exit the Poet,
To be a Perfect Poem ]