Epic Poetry: Difference between revisions

The epic was ranked by Aristotle (in his ''Poetics'') as second only to tragedy, and by Renaissance critics as the highest genre of all. The literary epic is certainly the most ambitious of poetic types, making immense demands on a poet’s knowledge, invention, and skill to sustain the scope, grandeur, and variety of a poem that tends to encompass the world of its day and a large portion of its learning. Despite numerous attempts over nearly three-thousand years, we possess no more than a half dozen epic poems of indubitable greatness. Literary epics are highly conventional poems which commonly share the following features, derived ultimately from the traditional epics of Homer:

The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic importance. In the ''Iliad'', he is the Greek warrior Achilles, who is the son of a Neried, Thetis; and Virgil’s Aeneas is the son of the goddess Aphrodite. In ''Paradise Lost'', Adam represents the entire human race, or if we regard Christ as the hero, he is both God and man. Blake’s primal figure is the "universal man" Albion who incorporates, before his fall, man and god and the cosmos as well.

The setting of the poem is ample in scale, and may be worldwide, or even larger. Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin (the whole of the world known to the author), and in Book XI, he descends into the underworld (as does Virgil’s Aeneas). The scope of ''Paradise Lost'' is cosmic, for it takes place on earth, heaven, and in hell.

The action involves superhuman deeds in battle, such as Achilles’ feats in the Trojan War, or a long and arduous journey intrepidly accomplished, such as the wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to his homeland, despite the opposition of some of the gods. ''Paradise Lost'' includes the war in heaven, the journey of Satan through chaos to discover the newly created world, and his desperately audacious attempt to outwit God by corrupting humanity, in which his success is ultimately frustrated by the sacrificial enterprise of Christ. And ''Gilgamesh'' portrays the eponymous hero’s search for a fountain of youth after the death of his friend, Enkidu.

In these great actions, the gods and other supernatural beings take an interest or an active part — the Olympian gods in Homer, and Jehovah, Christ, and the angels in ''Paradise Lost''. These supernatural agents were in the neoclassic age called the machinery, in the sense that they were a part of the literary contrivances of the epic.