The Epic / An Essay

om others; and feelings cannot be defined, but only related. If we define a poem, we say what we think about it; and that may not sufficiently imply the essenti

poem's spirit, and it is the spirit that we feel. If we can get some notion of how those poems, which we call epic, agree with one another in style, it is likely w

e, The Faery Queene and La Divina Commedia have been called epic poems; but I do not think that anyone could fail to admit, on a little pressure, that the experience of reading The Faery Queene or La Divina Commedia is not in the least like the experience of reading Paradise Lost or the Iliad. But as a poem may have lyrical qualities without being a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualities without being an epic. In all the poems which the world has agreed to call epics, there is a story told, and well told. But Dante's poem attempts no story at all, and Spenser's, though it attempts several, does not tell them well-it scarcely a

lated and fantastic; what is more important, it requires material invented by the poet himself. That is a long way from the solid reality of material which epic requires. Not manipulation, but imaginative transfiguration of material; not invention, but selection of existing material appropriate to his genius, and complete absorption of it into his being; that is how the epic poet works. Allegory is a beautiful way of inculcating and asserting some special significance in life; but epic has a severer task, and a more impressive one. It has not to say, Life in the world ought to mean this or that; it has to show life unmistakably being significant. It does not gloss or interpret the fact of life, but re-creates it and charges the fact itself with the poet's own sense of ultimate values. This will be less precise than the definite assertions of allegory; but for t

ere is nothing to choose between the Christians taking Jerusalem and the Greeks taking Troy; nor between Odysseus sailing into fairyland and Vasco da Gama sailing round the world. It is certainly possible that a poet might devise a story of such a kind that we could easily take it as something which might have been a real human experience. But that is not enough for the epic poet. He needs something which everyone knows about, something which indisputably, and admittedly, has been a human experience; and even Grendel, the fiend of the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet of Beowulf a figure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real; what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend which lives in pestilent fens? And the reason why epic poetry so imperiously demands reality of subject is clear; it is because such poetry has symbolically to re-create the actual fact and the actual particulars of human existence in terms of a general significance-the reader must feel that life itself has submitted to plastic imagination. No fiction will ever have the air, so necessary for this epic symbolism, not merely of representing, but of unmistakably being, human expe

y happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot now conveniently happen in Chili. The Araucana is versified history, not epic. That is to say, the action has no deeper significance than any other actual warfare; it has not been, and could not have been, shaped to any symbolic purpose. Long before Tasso and Camoens and Ercilla, two Scotchmen had attempted to put patriotism into epic form; Barbour had written his Bruce and Blind Harry his Wallace. But what with the nearness of their events, and what with the rusticity of their authors, these tolerable, ambling poems are quite unable to get the better of the hardness of history. Probably the boldest attempt to make epic of well-known, documented history is Lucan's Pharsalia. It is a brilliant performance, and a deliberate effort to carry on the development of epic. At the very least it has enriched the tho

Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Song of Roland, Paradise Lost and Gerusalemme Liberata, if epic is also to be the title for The Faery Queene and La Divina Commedia, The Idylls of the King and The Ring and the Book. But I believe most of the importance in the meaning of the word epic, when it is reasonably used, will be found in what is written above. Apart from the specific form of epic, it shares much of its ultimate intention with the greatest kind of drama (though not with all drama). And just as drama, whatever grandeur of purpose it may attempt, must be a good play, so epic must

nd I should say that the bright, exact diction and the modest metre of Jason are more interesting and attractive than the diction, often monotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, of Sigurd. Yet for all that it is the style of Sigurd that puts it with the epics and apart from Jason; for style goes beyond metre and diction, beyond execution, into conception. The whole imagination of

ms superhumanly concentrated. A story weighted with the epic purpose could not proceed at all, unless it were expressed in persons big enough to support it. The subject, then, as the epic poet uses it, will obviously be an important one. Whether, apart from the way the poet uses it, the subject ought to be an important one, would not start a very profitable discussion. Homer has been praised for making, in the Iliad, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject. It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really second-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him tha

viously devices for enlarging the scope of the action. The notion of a visit to the ghosts has fascinated many poets, and Dante elaborated this Homeric device into the main scheme of the greatest of non-epical poems, as Milton elaborated the other Homeric device into the main scheme of the greatest of literary epics. But a visit to the ghosts is, of course, like games or single combat or a set debate, merely an incident which may or may not be useful. Supernatural machinery, however, is worth some short discussion here, though it must be alluded to further in the sequel. The first and obvious thing to remark is, that an unquestionably epic effect can be given

e Iliad called The Cheating of Zeus. The salvationist school of commentators calls this an interpolation; but the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole of Homer's dealing with the gods; whenever, at least, he deals with them at length, and not merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is not to accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its climax in the fourteenth book. Nobody ever believed in Homer's gods, as he must believe in Hektor and Achilles. (Puritans like Xenophanes were annoyed not with the gods for being as Homer described them, but with Homer for describing them as he did.) Virgil is more decorous; but can we imagine Virgil praying, or anybody praying, to the gods of the Aeneid? The supernatural machinery of Camoens and Tasso is frankly absurd; they are not only careless of credibility, but of sanity. Lucan tried to do without gods; but his witchcraft engages belief even more faintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt the value of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is it

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is as if a man were to say, the essential thin