EPIC

In its strict sense the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or (in the instance of John Milton’s Paradise Lost) the human race.

There is a standard distinction between traditional and literary epics. “Traditional epics” (also called “folk epics” or “primary epics”) were written versions of what had originally been oral poems about a tribal or national hero during a warlike age.  Among these are the Iliad and Odyssey that the Greeks ascribed to Homer; the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf; the French Chanson de Roland etc.

“Literary epics” were composed by individual poetic 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 (1667). Paradise Lost in turn became, in the Romantic Period, a model for John Keats’ fragmentary epic Hyperion, as well as for William Blake’s several epics, or “prophetic books” (The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem), which translated into Blake’s own mythic terms the biblical narrative that had been Milton’s subject.

The epic was ranked by Aristotle as second only to tragedy, and by many Renaissance critics as the highest of all genres. The literary epic is certainly the most ambitious of poetic enterprises, making immense demands on a poet’s knowledge, invention, and skill to sustain the scope, grandeur, and authority of a poem that tends to encompass the world of its day and a large portion of its learning. Despite numerous attempts in many languages over nearly three thousand years, we possess no more than a half-dozen such poems of indubitable greatness.

Literary epics are highly conventional compositions which usually share the following features, derived by way of the Aeneid from the traditional epics of Homer:

1. The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic importance.

In the Iliad he is the Greek warrior Achilles, who is the son of the sea nymph Thetis; and Virgil’s Aeneas is the son of the goddess Aphrodite. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are the progenitors of the entire human race, or if we regard Christ as the protagonist, He is both God and man. Blake’s primal figure is “the Universal Man” Albion, who incorporates, before his fall, humanity and God and the cosmos as well.

2. The setting of the poem is ample in scale, and may be worldwide, or even larger.

Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin (the whole of the world known at the time), and in Book XI he descends into the underworld (as does Virgil’s Aeneas). The scope of Paradise Lost is the entire universe, for it takes place in heaven, on earth, in hell, and in the cosmic space between.

3. The action involves extraordinary deeds in battle.

Such as Achilles’ feats in the Trojan War, or a long, arduous, and dangerous journey intrepidly accomplished, such as the wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to his homeland, in the face of opposition by some of the gods. Paradise Lost includes the revolt in heaven by the rebel angels against God, the journey of Satan through chaos to discover the newly created world, and his desperately audacious attempt to outwit God by corrupting mankind, in which his success is ultimately frustrated by the sacrificial action of Christ.

4. In these great actions the gods and other supernatural beings take an interest or an active part—

The Olympian gods in Homer, and Jehovah, Christ, and the angels in Paradise Lost. These supernatural agents were in the Neoclassic Age called the machinery, in the sense that they were part of the literary contrivances of the epic.

5. An epic poem is a ceremonial performance, and is narrated in a ceremonial style which is deliberately distanced from ordinary speech and proportioned to the grandeur and formality of the heroic subject and architecture.

Hence Milton’s grand style—his formal diction and elaborate and stylized syntax, which are in large part modeled on Latin poetry, his sonorous lists of names and wide-ranging allusions, and his imitation of Homer’s epic similes and epithets.

Source:

A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams