Epic

Explore the glossary of poetic terms.

Epic is a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person or group of persons.

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History of the Epic Form

The word “epic” comes from Latin epicus and from Greek epikos, meaning “a word; a story; poetry in heroic verse.” The elements that typically distinguish epics include superhuman deeds, fabulous adventures, highly stylized language, and a blending of lyrical and dramatic traditions, which also extend to defining heroic verse.

Many of the world’s oldest written narratives are in epic form, including the Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Sanskrit Mahâbhârata, the Thai Ramakien, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Both of Homer’s epics are composed in dactylic hexameter, which became the standard for Greek and Latin oral poetry. Homeric verse is characterized by the use of extended similes and formulaic phrases, such as epithets, to fill out the verse form. Greek and Latin epics frequently open with an invocation to the muse, as is shown in the opening lines of The Odyssey.

Over time, the epic has evolved to fit changing languages, traditions, and beliefs. Some epics of note include Beowulf, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. The epic has also been used to formalize mythological traditions in many cultures, such as the Norse mythology in Edda and Germanic mythology in Nibelungenlied, and more recently, the Finnish mythology of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala.

In the twentieth century and beyond, poets expanded the epic genre further with a renewed interest in the long poem with the canto. Examples such as The Cantos by Ezra Pound, Maximus by Charles Olson, The Anniad by Gwendolyn Brooks, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, The Iovis Trilogy by Anne Waldman, and Paterson by William Carlos Williams all push and pull at the boundaries of the genre, re-envisioning the epic through the lens of modernism.

From A Poet’s Glossary

The following additional definition of the term epic is reprinted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch.

A long narrative poem, exalted in style, heroic in theme. The earliest epics all focus on the legendary adventures of a hero against the backdrop of a historical event: think of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s action-packed journey home in the eighth century BC Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, the models for epic poetry ever since; or the territorial battles of a warrior culture in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, dated between the eighth and eleventh centuries; or the preservation of a city and a civilization in the Babylonian Gilgamesh (ca. 1600–1000 BC). These epics seem to be the written versions of texts long sung and retold, composed and recomposed by many epic singers over time, all telling the tale of a tribe.

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Featured Poems

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Featured Poets

The following poets, as well as many others, are known for their work in the epic form.

Dante Alighieri: The author of La Commedia (The Divine Comedy), Dante Alighieri was born Durante Alighieri in Florence, Italy, in 1265.

Anne Carson: A poet, playwright, and classicist, Carson is the author of numerous genre-defying works that borrow from the epic form, including The Autobiography of Red.

Nazim Hikmet: Born in 1902 in what was then the Ottoman Empire, Hikmet went on to write multiple epic works, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse.

Homer: Credited with composing The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer is arguably the greatest poet of the ancient world. Historians place his birth sometime around 750 BC.

John Milton: Born in London in 1608, Milton published multiple epic poems, including Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.

Virgil: Publis Vergilius Maro, most famously the author of the Aeneid, was born in northern Italy in 70 B.C.E.

Anne Waldman: Born in New Jersey in 1945, Anne Waldman is known for her work in mythopoetics and is the author of the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy.

Related Resources

“By the time WWII broke out, H. D. was at the height of her idiosyncratic powers.... In Trilogy, her epic poem in three parts, written during World War II, she enters another phase of her writing—putting her visionary impulses to new uses. H. D. reports on war-torn London—not envisions, not invents or ennobles, but reports. The life of a bombed civilian city is of first importance; the speaker is one of its civilians.”

—“Shot Through with Brightness: The Poems of H. D.”

“Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epic poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But, of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted.”

—“Blank Verse and Style: On John Milton”

“Because epics, narrative poetry, and the voices that one grows up hearing were created by men, Notley says, female poets have suppressed what the female mind must have been like before the existence of the forms invented by men.... She writes, ‘there might be recovered some sense of what the mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it....’ In this light, the quoted, collage-like aspect of her epic poem is particularly interesting, as if she's saying the female epic voice can only be quoted, but not generated whole.”

—“Finding the Female Voice: Alice Notley’s Poems and Collages”

“Some of these long poems are epic (Waldman) and some anti-epic (Schuyler). Some are lyric sequences (Forché), some are hybrid texts (Waldman, Rankine, Williams), and some are book-length single poems with or without sections (Notley, Carson, Mayer, Sikelianos). Some are written in form (Koestenbaum) or look like prose (Stein) or read like a novel (Nelson). The form seems almost compelled to subvert (often by assimilating) genre categories. Still, long poems have more in common than just length, and the fact of their length alone is meaningful.”

—Rachel Zucker, “An Anatomy of the Long Poem”

Related Poetic Terms

Oral-Formulaic Method: “Milman Parry (1902–1935) and his student Albert Lord (1912–1991) discovered and studied what they called the oral-formulaic method... referred to as ‘oral-traditional theory,’ ‘the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition,’ and the ‘Parry-Lord theory.’ Parry used his study of Balkan singers to address what was then called the ‘Homeric Question,’ which circulated around the questions of ‘Who was Homer?’ and ‘What are the Homeric poems?’”—Edward Hirsch, A Poet's Glossary

Poetic Contest: “The poetic contest, a verbal duel, is common worldwide. It has been documented in a large number of different poetries as a highly stylized form of male aggression, a model of ritual combat, an agonistic channel, a steam valve, a kind of release through abuse. The poetic contest may be universal because it provides a socially acceptable form of rivalry and battle.” —Edward Hirsch, A Poet's Glossary

Verse Novel: “A novel in poetry. A hybrid form, the verse novel filters the devices of fiction through the medium of poetry. There are antecedents for the novelization of poetry in long narrative poems, in epics, chronicles, and romances, but the verse novel itself, as a distinct nineteenth-century genre, is different than the long poem that tells a story because it appropriates the discourse and language, the stylistic features of the novel as a protean form.” —Edward Hirsch, A Poet's Glossary

Epic

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