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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).
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