Epic
Explore the glossary of poetic terms.
An epic is a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person or a group of persons. Elements that typically distinguish epics include superhuman deeds, fabulous adventures, highly stylized language, and a blending of lyrical and dramatic traditions.
History of the Epic Form
Many of the world’s oldest written narratives are in epic form, including the Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Sanskrit Mahâbhârata, 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. Poets such as Lord Byron and Alexander Pope used the epic for comic effect in Don Juan and The Rape of the Lock. Other epics of note include Beowulf, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Dante’s Divine Comedy, 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 poems. 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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“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”