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The Epic

Definition

In its strict use by literary critics, the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long narrative poem an a great and serious subject, related in an elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race. The “traditional epics” (also called “primary epics” or “folk epics”) were shaped by a literary artist from historical and legendary materials which had developed in the oral traditions of his nation during a period of expansion and warfare. To this group are ascribed the Iliad and Odyssey of the Greek Homer, and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. The “literary” or “secondary” epics were composed by sophisticated craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form. Of this kind is Virgil’s Latin poem The Aeneid, which later served as the chief model for Milton’s literary epic Paradise Lost; and Paradise Lost in turn became a model for Keat’s fragmentary epic Hyperion, as well as for Blake’s several epics, or “prophetic books” (The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem) which undertook to translate into Blake’s own mythic terms the biblical design and materials which had served as Milton’s subject matter.