Epic

“ But one feels that this part of the art is still in its infancy. The epic, which at this period imposes its form on everything, the epic weighs heavily upon it and stifles it. The ancient grotesque is timid and forever trying to keep out of sight. ”

“ The life of the ode is ideal, that of the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this triple poetry springs from three grand sources—the Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects of thought at different eras of man and society. Here are its three faces—youth, manhood, old age. Examine a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse, and you will always reach the same fact—the lyric poets before the epic, the epic before the dramatic. ”

“ For epic material, it must be repeated, is not the same thing as epic poetry. Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, loosely related, sometimes contradictory, each piece of comparatively small size, with no intention beyond hearty narrative. It is a heap of excellent stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock-face of stubborn experience. But for this to be worked into some great structure of epic poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of producing individuality of much profounder nature than any of its fighting champions. ”

“ How could any true epic come out of that age, or find fountains in that critical, realistic, and polemical soul? To fuse a long narrative of heroic adventure in animated, picturesque, above all, in sincere verse, is an achievement reserved for men with a steadier glow, a firmer, simpler, more exuberant and more natural poetic feeling, than was possible in that time of mean shifts, purposeless public action, and pitiful sacrifice of private self-respect. ”

“ In the epic, the drama, the novel, the hero has nothing else to do but to make love, to deliver pretty speeches, perform remarkable feats and look graceful, and so he is ever so attractive. He plays upon the hearts, takes hold of the minds, fastens himself upon the imaginations of the gentle fair and fanciful. ”

“ An easy way to define epic, though not a very profitable way, would be to say simply, that an epic is a poem which produces feelings similar to those produced by Paradise Lost or the Iliad, Beowulf or the Song of Roland. Indeed, you might include all the epics of Europe in this definition without losing your breath; for the epic poet is the rarest kind of artist. And while it is not a simple matter to say off-hand what it is that is common to all these poems, there seems to be general acknowledgment that they are clearly separable from other kinds of poetry ”

“ We may, then, in a general survey, regard epic poetry as being in all ages essentially the same kind of art, fulfilling always a similar, though constantly developing, intention. Whatever sort of society he lives in, whether he be surrounded by illiterate heroism or placid culture, the epic poet has a definite function to perform. We see him accepting, and with his genius transfiguring, the general circumstance of his time; we see him symbolizing, in some appropriate form, whatever sense of the significance of life he feels acting as the accepted unconscious metaphysic of his age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By its comprehensiveness and the variety of its substance, which are the signs and products of its dramatic imagination, epic poetry of the heroic age is distinguished from the more abstract kinds of narrative, such as the artificial epic, and from all kinds of imagination or fancy that are limited in their scope. ”

“ In both epic and drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and gives history its direction and significance. ”

“ Being the "living history of the people," an epic should have "the breadth and volume of a river." All epics have therefore generally been "the first-fruits of the earliest experience of nature and life on the part of imaginative races"; and the real poet has been, as a rule, the race itself. ”

“ No poet who should accept the term could write an epic, with or without the “machinery.” Such acceptance would betoken that weakness of the poetic pinion which surely follows a want of faith in the invisible supervisive energies.
A genuine epic, of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. ”

“ In the broad and social sense, the epic is undeniably a greater type of fiction than the novel, because it is more resumptive of life in the large, and looks upon humanity with a vaster sweep of vision ”

“ Thus an epic might be a bad epic, but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. ”

“ The heroic ideal of epic is not attained by a process of abstraction and separation from the meannesses of familiar things. The magnificence and aristocratic dignity of epic is conformable to the practical and ethical standards of the heroic age; that is to say, it tolerates a number of things that may be found mean and trivial by academicians. Epic poetry is one of the complex and comprehensive kinds of literature, in which most of the other kinds may be included—romance, history, comedy ”

“ In an epic poem where the characters are vividly imagined, it follows naturally that their various moods and problems involve a variety of scenery and properties, and so the whole business of life comes into the story.
The success of epic poetry depends on the author's power of imagining and representing characters. A kind of success and a kind of magnificence may be attained in stories, professing to be epic, in which there is no dramatic virtue, in which every new scene and new adventure merely goes to accumulate, in immortal verse, the proofs of the hero's nullity and insignificance. ”

“ The case of the novel, the modern popular epic, is very different. Here we find the same wealth and variety of interests, circumstances, characters, and human relationships, the same world-background, and the same handling of events, that characterize the true epic. But there is lacking to it the primitive poetic state of the world, in which the true epic took its rise. The novel, in the modern acceptation of the term, presupposes a prosaically ordered reality. ”

“ To share the same lofty outlook, to breathe the same high air with those who first sensed a whole era of creative thoughts, is the next thing to being the gods' chosen medium for those primal expressions.
All this is not to say that the epic is the oldest form of literary expression, but it is the expression of the oldest literary ideas, for, even when the epic is not at all primitive in form, it deals essentially with elemental moods and ideals. ”

“ Some one once called the novel the “modern epic.” There is just enough truth in the saying to give it social currency in conversation, but it is true, so far as we know, that the ancient epic preceded the ancient drama, creating the taste and the demand for emotions which the dramatists subsequently satisfied, and it was perhaps because the epic was wholly historical in a measure, that the drama was founded upon an historical basis. ”

“ Hence an epic should be a story derived from some event in the history of Christian peoples, intrinsically noble and illustrious, but not of so sacred a character as to be fixed and immutable, and neither contemporary nor very remote. By the selection of such material the poem gains the authority of history, the truth of religion, the license of fiction, the proper atmosphere in point of time, and the grandeur of the events themselves. ”

“ The epic—we speak of the Æneid—is distinguished from the drama by this, that the development of character is subordinate to the evolution of plot, the actors are merged in the action. And as the drama may lean toward the epic, so the epic may lean toward history. That the poet unites in his own person the functions of scene-painter, machinist, and chorēgus, is only a difference of form. ”

“ It seems probable that, in the last resort, classification in literature rests on that least tangible, least definable matter, style; for style is the sign of the 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 we shall be as close as may be to a definition of epic. ”

“ We have not been discovering what an epic poem ought to be, but roughly examining what similarity of quality there is in all those poems which we feel, strictly attending to the emotional experience of reading them, can be classed together and, for convenience, termed epic. ”

“ The structure of the epic may be determined from the fundamental conception of its nature. As a narrative of an important and heroic event, it should be simple, direct, and dignified in its treatment. The incidents should be introduced in a natural order, and their prominence should be regulated according to their [146] relative importance. In an epic poem, as in every other creation of art, the law of symmetry should be observed.
But the epic admits of episode. The poet may stop the flow of his narrative for a time to dwell upon some incident connected with or growing out of the main theme. ”

“ That which is distinguished by the Name of Epic, or Heroic, is beyond comparison the Noblest, and most Excellent. An Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform. ”

“ Though you might tolerate a double ending here and there in an epic, I am sure, Mr Editor, you would stop your critical ears at the incessant jingle of an epic in which every couplet had a double rhyme. ”

“ The traditional epic, created by the people and only moulded by the minstrel, is so infinitely the more important for the history of culture, that, since this new field of investigation has become one of paramount interest, the literary epic has been in danger of neglect. ”

“ But Homer occurred; and the tales of Troy and Odysseus became incomparable poetry.
An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. An epic is not even a re-creation of old things; it is altogether a new creation, a new creation in terms of old things. And what else is any other poetry? The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling. ”

“ Among the varieties of poetry, the epic is more circumstantial in its descriptions than the drama or lyric poetry. But this external fidelity should not, in any art, extend to the representation of insignificant details, to the making of them an object of predilection, and to subordinating to them the developments which the subject itself claims. ”

“ In fact, the Epic is in every way a remarkable poem, which to be appreciated must not only be read, but studied."—Graphic, March 10th, 1877.
"We do not hesitate to advance it as our opinion that 'The Epic of Hades' will enjoy the privilege of being classed amongst the poems in the English language which will live."—Civil Service Gazette, March 17th, 1877. ”

“ This commission has been held by various kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority; now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels. They are not all amusing, and not all their prices are more than the rate of an old song. But they all have a value as trophies, as monuments of what was most important in their time, of the things in which the generations, wise and foolish, have put their trust and their whole soul. ”

“ The epic, in accord with history, does not always paint him as happy, as always victorious. It represents him sometimes as defeated, reduced to the most deplorable extremities, but never losing courage, and always vanquishing in the long run. ”

“ With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem. ”

“ The epic may in fact deal with many actions of one person, one action of a whole race, or many actions of many people; it need not necessarily deal with one action of one person, as Aristotle enjoins, but if it does so it is simply to show the ingenuity and excellence of the poet. ”