Epic Poetry

Epic Poetry (Gr. epos, 'a word,' 'a discourse') is that class of poetry which produces an imaginative description of events, real or fictitious, but considered as having already happened; as opposed to lyric poetry, which is an imaginative expression of internal subjective emotions with respect to external and objective facts. Of more complex character than the narrative ballad poem, the epic obviously is one of the earliest poetical forms in which the primitive imagination has found expression. It is impossible to classify the epics of various races, but a distinction has been made between 'epics of growth,' which consist of collections of ballads or poems composed by different authors, at different times, and dealing with a connected series of events, such as the Mahābhārata, the Nibelung story (Icelandic version), and the Kalevala, as contrasted with 'epics of art,' in which the events are grouped around some great structural thought by a single poet, like the Odyssey, the Aneid, Paradise Lost, and Jerusalem Delivered. Such epics as the Iliad and the Shah Nameh, again, belong to both classes at once. The term heroic epic, or heroic poem, is properly applied to such works as the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aneid, the Poem proper of the Cid, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and others, which describe the achievements of the gods and heroes of antiquity, or of the little less mythic knights of medieval chivalry. Poems, again, like Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Dante's Divina Commedia, are sacred epics; Lucan's Pharsalia and the Lusiads of Camoens, historical epics. Such poems as Scott's Marmion are genuine miniature epics, while Tennyson's Idylls of the King, from its artistic consecutiveness of motive, belongs also to the family; to quite another class—the mock-epic—belong such poems as Pope's Rape of the Lock, Butler's Hudibras, and the like. Poems of epic character are still written by ambitious poets, the fate of Glover's Leonidas not serving as sufficient warning; but the real epic of our modern civil and domestic life is the prose novel. The narrative and the descriptive poem are still written, but seldom with much success at great length. Even the dramatic poem in its ancient sense seems a form uncongenial to modern wits.