From the very beginning of his writing career Thomas Mann was concerned with his era's sense of historical belatedness, its posthumous character, and his sense of himself as an
epigone of bygone greatness, an ironist and humorist precisely because he is out of place in the modern world.
Caxton's early production of Higden's Polychronicon began a vogue of printed chronicles which peaked in the mid sixteenth century (Stow is the leader in number of editions at 25, with the
epigone Baker next at 13).
FDR grasped more firmly than his
epigone, Bill Clinton, who is ever ready to flaunt himself before the American public, the Machiavellian lesson that to wield great personal power in a democracy means to conceal the scope and nature of that power.
And what does his perseverance add up to: the triumph of an iconoclast or the tribulations of an
epigone? The first thing that can be said for Basil Bunting on Poetry, a diverting volume of lectures gamely reconstructed from rough drafts and audiotapes, is that it should squelch the temptation to caricature Bunting as some roaring Caliban sprung into free verse by Pound's rough magic.
His contemporary
epigone, on the other hand, is infatuated by power and flattered by the attention of those who wield it.
275-80), and we may see in this first modern translation of Wigalois a welcome further step in the rehabilitation of a work traditionally relegated to '
epigone' status.
Thus, the Straussian
epigone Francis Fukuyama celebrates the current American moment even more tastelessly than Hegel praised the Prussian monarchy, circa 1819, as the final form of the World Spirit.
Yet Petrarch loses none of his prominence, or the contest between Cicero and Augustine for his soul any of its drama; it is just that he represents an impasse in the history of humanism from which his
epigone Coluccio Salutati did not entirely escape (chap.
Clarke might have profitably pointed out that a roster of Vaughan Williams's students includes such independent spirits as Gordon Jacob, Grace Williams, and Elizabeth Maconchy, none of whom can accurately be dismissed as a mere
epigone of Vaughan Williams.
Again, the total freedom of time-to-come is the opportunity that Jacques Guttin (?) grasped as the best means of maximising the possibilities of the heroic romance in his
Epigone, histoire du siecle futur (1659).
Other poems in the collection such as "
Epigone," "By the By," and "Home" highlight Reid's unusual perspective, one that I suspect is informed by literature, art, science, and politics, as well as by a veiled counterculture.
Yet Roth began as an
epigone of Max Bill, obsessively perfect in every way.
