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Epic Poetry: Difference between revisions
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* Initiation of great enterprises, as the founding of a new city in the ''Aeneid'' | * Initiation of great enterprises, as the founding of a new city in the ''Aeneid'' | ||
* The performing of exploits, great and important; admirable actions accompanied by difficulty, temptations, and danger | * The performing of exploits, great and important; admirable actions accompanied by difficulty, temptations, and danger | ||
== Primary Epic == | |||
The primary epic comes from an oral literary tradition as a possible accumulation of lays or episodes. They are shaped by a literary artist from historical and legendary materials which had developed in the oral traditions of his nation during a period of expansion and warfare. These epics were composed without the aid of writing, sung or chanted to a musical accompaniment. Thus the composition of the oral epics is looser because it was composed for recitation. They are also more episodic in structure — the episodes can be detached from the whole and may be enjoyed as separate poems or stories. The heroic ideal suggests that the epic heroes in the oral epic are more concerned with their own personal self-fulfillment. The work focuses on the personal concept of heroism, and the self-fulfillment and identity of the individual hero. The national concept is secondary. The language in the oral epics is formulaic: repetitious use of stock phrases and descriptions to aid in oral recitation. Tends toward pleasing the ear rather than the eye. Focus on the spoken word. The movement tends to be cyclical, the theme of the return. The primary epics were developed in cultures that have not yet attained a national identity or unity. Greek city-states, etc. Examples of the primary epic include: the ''Iliad'', the ''Odyssey'', ''Beowulf'', ''Gilgamesh'' | |||
== Secondary Epic == | |||
Secondary epics are also called literary epics and were composed by sophisticated craftsmen in a deliberate imitation of the traditional form. Their efforts is attempt to use again in new circumstances what has already been a complete and satisfactory form of literature. The literary epics are composed more for readers in their structure and language. The concern is with the perfection of the word; sentences are carefully fashioned; words and phrases are more carefully chosen. There is less use of formulaic repetition. The heroic ideal: the hero is more concerned with national or universal duty than with personal happiness or self-fulfillment (e.g., Aeneas leaves Dido to continue his nation's destiny). In a highly organized society, the unfettered individual has no place. The hero is inspired by service to his nation, world, or cosmos, not by individual prowess. Social ideal replaces personal identity. The hero becomes a symbol for the nation or world as a whole. The language suggests a written ceremony — a deliberate distancing from ordinary speech and proportioned to the grandeur and formality of the heroic subject matter and epic architecture. The "grand," "ornate," and "elevated" style. The epic’s movement is toward rebirth. Aeneas leaves old Troy to found new Troy (Rome). The secondary epic is a product of highly structured cultures and societies, like Rome. Examples: the ''Aeneid'', ''Paradise Lost'', ''The Divine Comedy''. | |||
== Mock Epic == | |||
A mock epic, or mock heroic, poem imitates the elaborate form and ceremonious style of the epic genre, and applies it to a commonplace or trivial subject matter; the high brought low. In a masterpiece of this form, <a href="http://litmuse.maconstate.edu/~glucas/archives/000429.shtml"><i>The Rape of the Lock</i></a>, Alexander Pope views through grandiose epic perspective a quarrel between the beaux and belles of his day over the theft of Belinda’s curl. The story includes such elements of epic protocol as supernatural machinery, a voyage, a visit to the underworld, the arming of the hero, epic lists, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes — although with hatpins, snuff, and abusive language for weapons. The term mock heroic is often applied to other dignified poetic forms which are purposefully mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas Gray's comic "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat." | |||
== Epic Similes == | |||
Also called Homeric or extended similes, epic similes are formal and sustained similes in which the secondary subject, or vehicle, is developed far beyond its specific points of parallel to the primary subject, or tenor, becoming the more important aesthetic object for the moment. Essentially, the epic simile is an involved, elaborated comparison imitated from Homer by Virgil, Milton, and other writers of literary epics who employed it to enhance the ceremonial quality of the epic style. An outtake from the ''Iliad'' provides an example of an epic simile: | |||
: And swift Achilles kept on coursing Hector, nonstop | |||
as a hound in the mountains starts a fawn from its lair, | |||
hunting him down the gorges, down the narrow glens | |||
and the fawn goes to ground, hiding deep in brush | |||
but the hound comes racing fast, nosing him out | |||
until he lands his kill. (22.224-229) | |||
== Epic Spirit == | |||
In addition to its strict use, the term epic is often applied to works which differ in many respects form this model, but manifest, suggests critic E.M.W. Tillyard in his study ''The English Epic and Its Background'', the epic spirit in the scale, the scope, and the profound human importance of their subjects; Tillyard suggests these four characteristics of the modern epic: high quality and seriousness, inclusiveness or amplitude, control and exactitude commensurate with exuberance, and an expression of the feelings of a large group of people. Similarly, Brian Wilkie has remarked in ''Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition'', that epics constitute a family, with variable physiognomic similarities, rather than a strictly definable genre. In this broad sense, Dante's ''Divine Comedy'' and Spencer's ''Faerie Queene'' are often called epics, as are works of prose fiction such as Melville's ''Moby Dick'', and Tolstoy's ''War and Peace''; Northrop Frye has described Joyce's ''Finnegans Wake'' as the “chief ironic epic of our time” (''Anatomy of Criticism'' 323). Some critics have even look to the genre of [http://litmuse.maconstate.edu/~glucas/archives/000412.shtml science fiction] — in prose and film — for the twentieth century's continuing sense of the epic spirit. | |||