The Epic

Excerpt: ...great aspect of vital destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at least, as the poet's verbal art will let it. The usual attempts at stricter definition of epic than anything this chapter contains, are either, in spite of what they try for, so vague that they would admit almost any long stretch of narrative poetry; or else they are based on the accidents or devices of epic art; and in that case they are apt to exclude work which is essentially epic because something inessential is lacking. It has, for instance, been seriously debated, whether an epic should not contain a catalogue of heroes. Other things, which epics have been required to contain, besides much that is not worth mentioning,5 are a descent into hell and some supernatural machinery. Both of these are obviously 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 without any supernatural machinery at all. The poet of Beowulf has no need of it, for instance. A Christian redactor has worked over the poem, with more piety than skill; he can always be detected, and his clumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenour of the poem. The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; and beyond there is an endless, ...