A decidedly American tradition, the long poem became the premier
literary endeavor for poets in the twentieth century. Writers such as
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams worked on long
poems, but under the auspices of the "modern epic." The three postmodern
long poems under study here- Kenneth Koch's Seasons on Earth, Edward
Dorn's Gunslinger, and James Merrill's The Changing Light at
Sandover-illustrate a dramatic rupture with the texts of modernism by
introducing comic motifs and multi-voiced narration-situations described
by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin as "carnival" and "dialogism"
respectively-into the canon of the American long poem. These innovations
allow the postmodern long poem to evolve past the thematic and aesthetic
strictures imposed by the texts of modernism. They represent an opening
up of the genre and hint at directions the long poem may take in the
future. The present study should have appeal to researchers and students
of postmodern literature, particularly poetry, as well as general
readers interested in recent developments in the world of letters.