"A Stone, a Leaf, a Door": the narrative poetics of Thomas Wolfe.

From almost the beginning of Thomas Wolfe's career, readers and critics have struggled to understand and categorize the nature of his art. Although his works have most frequently been called novels and Wolfe has taken his place in the pantheon of great American novelists, scholars have wrestled with genre terminology, as his fiction seems to defy many traditional narrative expectations. Leo Gurko, in Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic Ego, mentions the frequent criticism that "His novels are not really works of art but loose explosions of verbal energy" (3). C. Hugh Holman, in a classic study of Wolfe's fiction, The Loneliness at the Core, adopts and then discards a number of terms to describe Wolfe, including anthologist, "diviner" (xvii), and epic poet. These designations do not necessarily contradict one another but do complicate our understanding of Wolfe's literary achievement.

The term epic poet, in particular, deserves further study as a way to "get at" certain basic qualities of the Wolfe texts we read and study. In a poem written in 2010 called "Untamed Wolfe," I described the novels as "gangly / flamboyant poems." Such terminology could easily be chalked up to poetic license. However, if we look more deeply into Wolfe's characteristic rhetorical posture, into the way he uses language and constructs relations between subject, narrator, and reader, we can see substantially greater reliance on lyric techniques and structures than has hitherto been supposed. So much so that Thomas Wolfe, rather than being a writer of novels imbued with lyric flourishes, seems more a narrative poet, whose worldview and approach to writing rely fundamentally on the assumptions of poetry.

It may seem strange to regard Wolfe as a poet, since his novels and stories embody virtually all the signature elements of fiction. M. M. Bahktin, in The Dialogic Imagination, identifies a major characteristic as "stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel" (11). The novel represents an amalgam of genres that "makes wide and substantial use of letters, diaries, confessions, the forms and methods of rhetoric ..." (33), and, we might add in Wolfe's case, anatomy, allegory, quasi-journalistic commentary, social satire, and dramatic enactment. For Bahktin, the novel "does not participate in any harmony of the genres" (4).

As compared to poetry, fiction distinguishes itself through emphasis on incidents and characters intersecting in time. J. Arthur Honeywell refers to plot as "temporal synthesis," "an organizing and unifying principle" operating through time (239). But as E. M. Forster so succinctly points out, a sequence of events is not sufficient; causality is a vital component. In his example, we have plot only if "The king died, and then the queen died of grief " (86; emphasis mine). Without connective causality, fiction falls apart. The frequent criticism of Thomas Wolfe's fiction for apparent formlessness suggests that further scholarly investigation into the workings of its causality is merited.

Narrative not only requires characters; it also feeds on their change and development delivered against the background of a temporal canvas. Henry James, in "The Art of Fiction," argues for the inseparability of incidents and characters (19). William Gass argues that "a great character has an endless interest": "Even the most careful student will admit that fiction's fruit survives its handling and continues growing off the tree" (269). Reading fiction, we revel to a greater or lesser degree in the fortunes of well-conceived characters, in particular in the protagonist and his or her nemeses. Plot and character are inseparably fused, enacted before our reading eyes in time and imagined space. In terms of conventional plot and development of character, Wolfe's fiction has frequently been found wanting, suggesting that its organizing principles lie somewhere else.

Of course, fiction overlaps with poetry in a number of areas, and no clear line can be drawn between the two genres, as many prose poems attest. Karl Shapiro even claims, somewhat whimsically, "there is no borderline between poetry and prose. ... There is only greater or lesser heat" (101). But most readers and critics do see a distinction, if not a separation. Galway Kinnell argues that poetry should be "free of narrative" (qtd. in Berry 152), whereas Wendell Berry sees "suppression of narrative" as a "diminishment" of poetry (152, 153). Berry, in fact, advocates for more narrative poetry in contemporary letters, a hybrid form standing at the nexus of two genres. Such fusion is common in Wolfe's fiction.

Novels do often turn poetic, particularly in description, and probably none more than the novels of Thomas Wolfe. But other lyric elements inform fiction from within. R. S. Crane suggests a kind of "poetry" in the pleasure and interest readers get from plots of action, plots of character, and plots of thought (135). In addition to plot and characterization, fiction creates its own formal beauty through repetition, motif, counterpoint, and other narrative effects. Yet compared to poetry, fiction typically deemphasizes language effects for their own sake--when not connected directly to plot or character. In fiction, as in drama, thought most often is expressed through plot, character, and enactment. Poetic flights of fancy in fiction occur most frequently in descriptions and contemplations.

As readers soon notice, Wolfe's narratives rely to an extraordinary degree on poetic effects. The novels revel in extended lyric catalogues and evocative descriptions of nature and urban environments. When the ocean-liner Vesuvia nears the coast of the North American continent in chapter 17 of The Web and the Rock, the sea, personified, "says to the sick heart: 'I am the sea. I have no end or limit. There is no shore, no coast, no harbor at the end'" (297). Repeating refrains are used to a striking degree, operating poetically and often incorporating other lyric elements such as assonance, symbolism, and slant or interior rhyme. A perfect example of the latter appears early in The Web and the Rock: "You don't remember Old Catawba in this way," then a few sentences later, "this is one of the ways that Old Catawba looks in May" (16).

In contrast to conventional fiction, poetry aims to evoke emotion and thought through sensual language. For Antonio Machado, the great Spanish poet, "The anecdotal, the documentary of the human, is not poetic in itself" (166). Machado proclaims "the right of the lyric to relate pure emotion, eliminating the totality of the human anecdote" (166). This claim suggests a basic opposition between the lyric poem, at least, and the novel. Wolfe's novels appear to put the lie to that assertion, as Hiroshi Tsunemoto has suggested in examining Wolfe's "haiku world." Yet Machado's assertions do raise the issue of temporality in human experience and how it is variously rendered in poetry and fiction.

A given poem, like a story, takes place in time, but typically the moment is brief and intense and often suggests something timeless, an experience somehow "outside time" that can be visited again and again by rereading the poem. Machado claims that "poetry is the word in time" (qtd. in Gibbons 303), which suggests a common linkage with fiction but rejects the grounds for temporal comparison. Causality in poetry, moreover, is often obscure: specifying a given experience's historical or contextual roots ordinarily ranks below thought and feeling. Poetry always includes characters, but frequently we are unsure who they are--is the poet him- or herself talking? A younger, older, or alternative persona? Who, if anyone in particular, is the addressee of the poem? Plot and character, so central to narrative, play a background role in poetic conception.

Wolfe's narrative poetics involve not merely the lyric elements he wields for rhapsodic effect, which are evident to all readers and beloved by many. At a more foundational level, Wolfe's worldview is poetic, with accompanying lyric structures and predispositions. As Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney points out, a poetic sensibility involves "not only a poet's way with words, his management of meter, rhythm, and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance toward life, a definition of his own reality" (269). By looking at the assumptions and architectonics of genre, we can better see the uniqueness of Wolfe's accomplishment and at the same time respond to certain criticisms of his prose for not more closely following the traditions of written narrative. Along the way, we discover in Wolfe a distinct evolution in lyric technique that marks the range of his narrative poetics from Look Homeward, Angel to You Can't Go Home Again.

In any exploration of Wolfe's literary orientation, three major foundational elements of poetry stand out. The first involves the purpose of the literary expression. Except for expressly narrative modes like epics and ballads, poems focus on creating a meaningful thought impression through sensual language, relying heavily on imagery and metaphor. According to Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, "The poet tries to fix the transitory spectacle that he perceives. Each day, every minute, the urge to arrest the course of life falls upon him ..." (44). Lyric poems, in particular, capture brief moments of intense human experience, articulating emotions and exploring thoughts and becoming memorable through striking rhythmic linguistic effects.

Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") serves as a useful example of poetic teleology. We recognize in this poem a speaker who appears to be a manifestation of the author in his persona as smitten lover. We know from biographical sources that the addressee of the poem is an attractive, light-haired young male. There has been considerable speculation about who the young man actually was, but from reading this poem alone, we cannot determine whether the be loved is male or female. We don't know how long or in what ways the speaker may have known this person, nor when the two might have seen each other, or where. In short, we know almost nothing about the narrational elements of the relationship-who, what, when, where--that we would need in a story.

Instead, the sonnet provides two major communications: (1) the speaker's professed devotion and undying love, articulated in memorable words; and (2) rich sensory imagery evoking sympathetic responses in a hypothetical or actual reader. This lyric poem, in other words, does not rely upon details of plot or character for its powerful effects, but rather upon summoning thoughts and feelings in a reader similar to those professed by the speaker-poet. The sensory language--emphasizing "eternal summer" and "gold complexion" free from any taint of Death's shade--convinces us of the rare beauty of true love. The emotions are asserted in poetic lines the speaker is convinced will outlive any narrative of the particulars involved. And of course that has proven true as we laud this poem some four hundred years after it was written.

Turning now to Thomas Wolfe, we witness a similar reliance on imagery and metaphor in the final pages of Look Homeward, Angel. Late in the novel, the spirit or ghost of Ben asks the protagonist, Eugene Gant, "What do you want to remember?" (621). The narrator responds," A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And the forgotten faces" (621). A few pages later, Eugene himself appropriates these words, "And a stone, a leaf, a door? Ben?" (624) These phrases are clearly lyrical rather than narrational. The stone, leaf, and door--mineral, vegetable, and man-made--do not refer to any particular fictional events or characters. They are not, for instance, clues in a crime narrative. Although the images articulate Eugene's distress, they cannot be said to characterize him in any conventionally narrational way. In short, these three symbols do not advance or sustain the plot as we traditionally understand it, although I will argue later that Wolfe's fiction employs poetic elements in its arsenal of literary effects.

Rather, the "a stone, a leaf, a door" motif--and it functions here as motif as well as agglomeration of symbols--serves a largely poetic purpose of emotive evocation. All three elements are singular, and only one man-made. Their juxtaposition suggests an interaction between human and natural worlds as mediated through individual experience and consciousness. We are not meant to think of specifics--for instance, that the door could refer to the actual front or back door of the Old Kentucky Home, or the leaf to a pressed memento from a particular tree now situated in a family scrapbook. Rather, the three items function as lyric symbols: the stone suggesting longevity, the leaf transience, and the door transition and departure. Analogues of this famous lyric triad from Look Homeward, Angel can be found all through Wolfe's fiction, which is suffused at a deep level with elements characteristic of poetry. As we shall see later, Wolfe's use of refrains and other poetic techniques changes somewhat over the course of his relatively short career.

A second foundational element of poetry involves the speaker. This voice in the poem, also referred to as the lyric "I," serves as the equivalent of "narrator" for the experiences being dealt with lyrically. In narrative forms like ballad or epic, the speaker's presence is nearly invisible, resembling the omniscient voice of third-person narrative. In virtually all other poetry, however, the speaker plays a significant role, and particularly in lyric poetry, where the speaker's presence is palpable and vital. In such poems, the speaker often resembles the author him- or herself. But this persona is always a filtered and tailored version of the authorial self, refracted through a particular mood, desire, stance, neurosis, or other perspective. The speaker as refracted in the poem is never the poet fully her- or himself but rather a brief, partial, strategic construction furthering the overall lyric communication.

In the famous mid-twentieth-century poem, "Elegy for Jane," Theodore Roethke presents the speaker as a version of himself as literature professor, grieving over a student who has died after being thrown from a horse. In the first of four stanzas, carefully chosen natural imagery depicts the female student in quick, light strokes: "a sidelong pickerel smile"; "A wren, happy, tail into the wind" (98). The second stanza focuses on the young woman's sadness, where "Even a father could not find her" (98). In the third stanza, the speaker turns to address the victim directly: "My sparrow, you are not here" (98). In the concluding stanza, the speaker pulls back a bit:

   If only I could nudge you from this sleep ...
   I, with no rights in this matter,
   Neither father nor lover. (98)

In this evocative poem, the speaker moves autobiographically in and out of his subject, maintaining his stance as grieving teacher while approaching intimacy from a distance then retreating again for rich emotional effect.

In Wolfe we witness a similar authorial filtering, combined with approach and withdrawal. We noted earlier the narrational slippage of the "a stone, a leaf, a door" refrain from the narrator's perspective to Eugene's own mouth. Of Time and the River represents an interesting stage in Wolfe's development of the

speaker interacting with his subject matter, in many instances less rhapsodically than in Look Homeward, Angel. Like the earlier book, Of Time and the River makes use of evocative refrain:

"October has come again, has come again ... I have come home again, [...] and that was time ... time ... time ..." (328). Sometimes the refrain is directly quoted yet unattributed, sometimes rendered without quotes as simple narration. This slippage in and out of ostensible narration is characteristic of poetic speakers, who often intrude into, interact with, and withdraw from the events they are observing and depicting.

But the refrains in OfTime and the River seem to function not only as literary frame as they do in Look Homeward, Angel, but also as counterpoint to the narrative. Long passages in the middle chapters of the novel are delivered in realistic prose, at times inflected to deliciously satiric effect. The famous scene in Blackstone (Greenville), South Carolina, for instance, features the "down-home" dialogue of Eugene and his erstwhile companions interacting inside and outside the county jail following a night of outlandish, drunken revelry. When, after "months of frenzy, drunkenness, and arrest" (419), Eugene finds himself alone in the city, the language of realism gives way to countervailing poetry:

   A thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his
   mind, and at the same time there began to smoulder in his heart a
   dogged resentment and hatred of this nameless fear, this wordless
   and sourceless shame, impalpable, causeless, maddening, which
   pressed upon him from the sky. ... (420)

Beginning in chapter 62, the speaker in Of Time and the River takes on yet another role--that of drama critic. In this sequence, he opines with satisfaction that Mannerhouse, which we know to be Wolfe's own play, "was probably influenced a good deal by The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov ..." (544). The narrator assures us that "there was good stuff in the play, dramatic conflict, moving pageantry. ... The scenes between the hero and his father--the leonine and magnificently heroic 'General'-were also good ..." (545). Here we witness the literary pride of a narrator much in keeping with that of the speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, who expresses confidence that the power of his words "gives life" to the beloved and virtually guarantees immortality.

As this metaliterary passage from Of Time and the River suggests, narrators in much of Wolfe's fiction are highly, though not altogether, autobiographical. Noteworthy discrepancies and distortions serve to further given literary purposes. The early pages of "The Child by Tiger" chapter in The Web and the Rock, for instance, suggest a boy's view of playing football in the yard, whereas after the murders are discovered, the narration reverts to a more laconic, "This was what had happened" (146). As Anne R. Zahlan has noted about this chapter, the "central consciousness. ... At times reveals no traces of an author; at other times it is openly self-conscious" (9). Readers are drawn into the innocent consciousness at the heart of the action, then jerked suddenly back to a more sober, public assessment. The strategy in "The Child by Tiger" is lyrically and dramatically effective, and most readers probably don't even notice the discrepancy, but Wolfe's shifting narration is bound to offend purists. For these and other reasons, I argue that Wolfe's narrators more nearly resemble the shape-shifting speakers of lyric poetry than they do narrators of traditional novels.

The third foundational element in poetry involves what I call the triangular relationship among speaker, subject, and reader. Virtually every lyric poem enacts, at least implicitly, such a triangle. For Machado, feelings "always contain a collaboration with a 'You'" (167). The twentieth-century French poet Rene Char goes one step further: "A poem is always married to someone" (60). Moreover, compared to the consumer of fiction, the reader of a poem is more deeply implicated in constructing the meaning. Philip Levine "anticipates, beyond the limits of his isolation, a reader--but an ideal reader with whom he may be in touch only by his poetry ..." (Berry 143). Every poet to a greater or lesser extent either assumes or addresses a would-be reader. The reader finds him- or herself, whether willingly or not, situated as a kind of eavesdropper on or silent witness to interactions between speaker and subject.

William Butler Yeats's classic poem, "Adam's Curse," offers an excellent example of the rhetorical triangle that operates in virtually every lyric poem. The speaker presents himself in the guise of a poet remembering an afternoon gathering of artistically inclined friends. Three people are mentioned, but the focus falls on the poetic speaker and "That beautiful mild woman," clearly modeled on Maud Gonne, who captures his attention (78). After a brief introduction to what appears later to be a pleasant outdoor setting, the speaker recounts the woman's argument that "we must labour to be beautiful" (78). In what becomes a kind of debate, the speaker counters that "There have been lovers who thought love should be / So much compounded of high courtesy ..." (78-79). After he pulls back to describe objectively the "last embers of daylight" (79), the speaker turns in direct address to the woman:

   I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
   That you were beautiful, and that I strove
   To love you in the old high way of love; ..." (79)

In this poem the lyric triangle encompasses the speaker, the "beautiful mild woman," and the reader. However, the reader is not merely a passive recipient of the words of the poem. Instead, he or she is brought in to the setting early and becomes a witness, even an eavesdropper, on the conversation. The debate at the center of the poem requires the reader to think, to agree or disagree with one side or the other. Moreover, the speaker appears to solicit sympathy not only from the beautiful woman but also from the reader. At the conclusion, after the narrative pulls back to a more objective stance, the speaker turns to address the woman in what would seem a private communication "for no one's but your ears" (79). But in fact, this communication is also public, and the reader is encouraged to judge it. This sort of lyric triangle implicates the reader in a plot orchestrated by the speaker-poet, who shifts focus and rhetorical stance for emotional effect.

A similar triangle of perception operates in Wolfe's major novels. The speakers in the four best-known works are shifting versions of the author, intersecting with other characters and with elements of the natural and man-made world. The Of Time and the River account of Eugene Gant's travels in South Carolina, for instance, refracts Wolfe's personal experience for the benefit of readers who become co-travelers and witnesses of what the author presents for our literary viewing. Similarly, Gant's and George Webber's later travels to and discoveries in New York, then France and Germany, are rendered as quasi-fictionalized poetic evocation, which readers are implicitly invited to discover and savor for themselves.

Of course, these refracted experiences of the omnivorous, ever-adventurous author also include conventional narration of events and characters based on real life. But the organization of many of the episodes--apart from self-contained narratives like "The Child by Tiger"--more closely resembles the perspective of a poetic speaker seeking to re-create experience for readers, who may be moved to co-create the meaning of the text. The first page of the prologue to O Lost asks the reader directly, "Which of us has known his brother?" virtually demanding a response. And the meaning of the evocative lyric refrain of that book, "O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again" (5) is not self-evident but must be decoded or made relevant to each individual reader.

A particularly striking example of the lyric triangle occurs in "The Looking Glass" chapter of The Web and the Rock. Monk Webber is in hospital near the end of the book when he spies his reflected image in a looking glass. What follows is an ironic, light-hearted yet penetrating dialogue between Body and Monk himself: "Who let you out?. ... Out, hell! Who put me in, you mean?" (690). Of the two, Monk seems more inquisitive, Body more sneering. But Body has the last word, "I'm just a millstone around your neck--an accident" (691), after which the reflected selves stare at each other and grin. In this segment, time seems to stop, and we are reminded strongly of the dialogues of body and soul by William Butler Yeats, which may well have influenced Wolfe's composition. In any case, as readers we overhear this dialogue not in narrative time but in a poetic dimension to which we bring part of ourselves.

In seeking to understand the full range of Wolfe's narrative poetics, we do well to examine a crafted jewel like "The Capture" chapter from near the end of You Can't Go Home Again. This beautiful vignette contains all the elements I have previously discussed, but fused together in a breathtakingly poignant union of fiction, drama, and poetry. In terms of pure narration, not that much happens: in the compartment of a train in Nazi Germany, a Jew is singled out among the passengers and brusquely arrested by police, presumably never to be seen again. But the plot is not our main interest and not the primary source of this vignette's piercing emotional power.

Instead, Wolfe makes extraordinary use of foreshadowing. Long, evocative descriptions of foreboding are placed early: "Even before you see the faces of the people, something about their backs, their posture, the position of their heads and shoulders tells you what has happened ... you sense immediately the final stage of tragedy" (692). But the genius of this passage is that no one has yet died--the tragedy occurs only offstage at the end of the chapter. The means of the Jew's presumed demise is an officer whom George instinctively recognizes as "sinisterly unpleasant" (694). The narrative continues largely through discussion among the passengers of the Jew's identity and misfortune. As readers, our identification is with the witnesses of the events, George Webber in particular, who feels "sick, empty, nauseated" (697) as the unfortunate Jew is hauled away.

In typical Wolfean fashion, this powerful episode begins and ends in lyricism. At the outset, the narrator celebrates the "tremendous power and weight" of the German locomotive at the border (691). At the end, a refrain creates a marvelous poetic effect: after the passengers watch in horror as police haul the Jew away, "still smiling his horrible little forced smile of terror" (698), the narrator intones, "They had him, all right," and again, more succinctly, "they had him" (699). But the narration in the final paragraph, a single sentence only, shifts focus suddenly: "The train swept out and gathered speed--and so they lost him" (699). Here the "they" is no longer the thick-waisted police but the passengers, who no longer "have him" but have lost. And they have lost not only him; they have also lost something humane in themselves by watching and not intervening.

This marvelous piece of writing represents Wolfe at his best. Although delivered as a prose narrative, its power derives from a skillful deployment of dramatic effects, building to a lyric climax. Particularly striking here, as compared to the flamboyant refrains of O Lost and Look Homeward, Angel, is the fusion of poetic elements with the narrational and dramatic features. The refrain, "They had him," not only functions as poetry but also furthers narrative and dramatic development. This episode reveals Wolfe's late mastery of narrative poetics. The speaker of this passage, embodied in the consciousness of George Webber interacting with his fellow travelers, has burned off all residue of ego and romantic formalism and become a clear window through which the reader perceives his or her own guilt.

There are many ways to conceive of the poet. Karl Shapiro argues that "everyone is part poet; it is the poet in each of us that responds to the whole poet" (101). The poet's senses "are naturally open and vitally sensitive" (100). But if I am right that, in fundamental ways, Thomas Wolfe is a poet who uses lyric techniques and perspectives as a major component of his fiction, then several implications result. The first involves the rather self-evident formlessness of the novels, particularly the three published after Look Homeward, Angel. C. Hugh Holman's The Loneliness at the Core lays out many conventional complaints: Malcolm Cowley asserts that Wolfe's "best passages are scattered ... they occur without logic or pattern" (qtd. in Holman xvii). Robert Penn Warren describes Of Time and the River as "a novel possessing no structure in the ordinary sense of the word" (qtd. in Holman xvii). And Holman writes that Bernard DeVoto, bete noir of Wolfe studies, claims that the writer possesses "great narrative and dramatic talents but [is] unable to realize them in novelistic form" (15). To many critics, Wolfe "simply was not a novelist" (14).

These criticisms, to my mind, are considerably negated if we reconceptualize the nature of Wolfe's purpose and art. Even his severest critics admit that "On the level of dramatic scene ... Wolfe could construct magnificently" (Holman 3). And the nature of many attacks reinforces my argument that we should regard Thomas Wolfe as primarily a poet working through narrative. Holman sees Wolfe's fiction "as the impassioned, almost inspired expression of a diviner" (xviii). But he accuses Wolfe of not letting "the scene or the senses speak for themselves; rather, he felt an obligation to define the emotion which he associated with the scene and to suggest a meaning, a universality, a significance through rhetorical exhortation" (3). Essentially, these complaints amount to a dissatisfaction with Wolfe for being too much a poet and not sufficiently a novelist of conventional means. Holman goes on to complain that many passages "are marked by extravagant verbal pyrotechnics--by apostrophe, by incantation, by exhortation, by rhapsodic assertion ..." (3). Need I point out how self-evidently poetic these features are?

Apart from their appearance in a work presented as prose fiction, these devices would not be at all surprising in an extended work of poetry. So if, as Holman and others have claimed, You Can't Go Home Again "is hardly a novel at all" (18) and "His total work stands ... as a group of fragments imperfectly bodying forth a seemingly ineffable cosmic vision ..." (23), how can we most productively assess Wolfe's admittedly powerful achievement? I return to my central argument that Wolfe can best be regarded as a poet of narrative. If critics see Wolfe in his apostrophes trying "to describe emotion which he felt and which he and the reader must share with the character" (Holman 45), that is not at all surprising. Such literary strategies are entirely consonant with the lyric triangle I consider fundamental to poetic sensibility.

Holman, like many others before and since, continued to wrestle with the nature of Wolfe's art and achievement. At one point he suggests that Wolfe's true genre was "anthology" (81; emphasis in orig.). This is true to the extent, particularly in the posthumous works, that editors collected unpublished fragments and assembled them into artificially constructed wholes. But the term anthology does not adequately designate what readers experience as a more coherent achievement. John S. Barnes, in a small collection called A Stone, a Leaf, a Door published by Scribner's in 1945, underscores the poetic nature of Wolfe's genius by presenting passages from the fiction in poetic form. While motivated by good intention, this effort does not adequately capture Wolfe's expansive vision.

Toward the end of The Loneliness at the Core, Holman suddenly shifts ground, arguing that Wolfe in the four novels and in masterful novellas like The Hills Beyond has constructed an imperfect but massive, multivolume American epic (161). Robert F. Sayre, in The Examined Self, has identified the tendency of American writers from early on to present themselves as epic heroes, and it is enlightening and certainly tempting to place Wolfe in this tradition. Yet while the notion of epic poet comes closest to my conception, we are still left with our experiences of reading Wolfe's writing, not in some imagined epic totality, but in individual texts that evoke in us particular responses.

Holman argues that Wolfe was "a writer of remarkably limited self-criticism and poor artistic judgment" (xvii). But he may have achieved precisely the literary effects he wanted. If, in fact, Wolfe's worldview is systematically poetic, even as he wrote gigantic prose structures, then his use of autobiographically based poetic speakers rather than conventional fictional narrators becomes more understandable. Wolfe's literary goal all along may have been more poetic than narrational. Indeed, the passages that readers remember with greatest fondness tend to be the poetic refrains and evocations. A fuller version of the passage from poet Luis Cernuda quoted earlier perfectly captures the lyric drive in Thomas Wolfe: "Each day, every minute, the [poet's] urge to arrest the course of life falls upon him, a course so full at times that it would seem to merit an eternal continuation" (44).

Wolfe's major novels, I would argue, function in significant ways as complicated and ornate prose poems. While incorporating story, drama, and other literary forms, they seem designed to evoke memorable thoughts and feelings through rich, suggestive imagery and metaphor. The stance of the narrator in the bulk of Wolfe's fiction evokes a poetic speaker, directing or moderating our experience of what the author has himself witnessed and rendered literarily in narrative lyricism. The reader of Wolfe is frequently invited, even required, to participate in co-creating the events being so evocatively described. Poetic elements in Wolfe's writing are not mere flourishes or decorations on a narrative structure. The lyricism instead grows out of the bedrock of his personality and perspective on the world, his approach to living with voracious curiosity, unquenchable thirst, and captivating intensity.

Works Cited

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James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction." 1884. Excerpted in Hoffman and Murphy 14-23.

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Radavich, David. "Untamed Wolfe." Unpublished poem. 2010.

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Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. New York: Scribner's, 1929. Print.

--. Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth. New York: Scribner's, 1935. Print.

--. O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life. Ed. Arlyn Bruccoli and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000. Print.

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Yeats, William Butler. "Adam's Curse." The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1970. 78-79. Print.

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Author:	Radavich, David
Publication:	Thomas Wolfe Review
Article Type:	Critical essay
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Jan 1, 2011
Words:	5871
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Topics:	Literary techniques Analysis Novelists Criticism and interpretation