One thing to think of, in reading Stubborn Grew, is that it is just the first "book" in a 4-book poem called Stubborn Grew/The Rose, or Forth of July. & that in this first book I try to transumpt or subsume the entire notion of epic - fold it into a deeper, vaguer notion of a primal Orpheus-relation (or Eurydice- or Beatrice-relation). So in a sense Stubborn is an anti-epic. It's "hero" (Henry) never leaves the coffee table on Wickenden Street. His poem deconstructs rather than builds before his eyes. The first half is a parodic Dantesque "CATabasis" (journey to hell and back); the second half is bracketed by spoofs of The Cantos & Finnegans Wake, respectively. Why is Stubborn designed this way? Because on a certain para-literary level the first book of Forth of July is a Lenten act of repentance (overseen by William Blackstone); a "shriving" of the fictional distance between poet & "epic hero". It's a "carnivalization" of epic - followed by the romance-experiments of its sequels (The Rose out of the Lenten ashes).