Friday, November 10, 2006

New forms of epics will continue to be written

The real goal of the epic, from Homer to Spenser over Vergil and Dante, has been to help man understand the past (which in epic poetry, as we have stated, includes "what might have happened") through the deeds of a hero representing the fate of his community in order to better shape the future. In the West, the "Iliad", "Odyssey", and "Nibelungenlied", and in the East, the "Mahabharata", "Ramayana", and "Shahnama" are often cited as outstanding examples of the epic genre. To these we have to add Vergil's "Aeneid", Lucan's "Pharsalia", and Statius's "Thebaid". The first recorded epic is the Sumerian "Gilgamesh", while the longest is the "Tibetan Epic" of King Gesar, composed of roughly 20 volumes and more than one million verses.1
It is also appropriate at this stage to mention some of the translations of the greatest epics, as they constitute works of art in themselves, like Douglas's "Aeneid", Harington's "Ariosto", Fairfax's "Tasso", Chapman's "Homer", Sylvester's "Du Bartas", and Pope's "Iliad". It is thanks to them that we can read the greatest epics of the past, although of course a translation will never be like the original...
"Beowulf", written in alliterative measure, represents about 10% of the extant corpus of Old English poetry. It has 3,182 lines in a single manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A XV) and is considered the masterpiece of Old English literature. It was most probably written between 700 and 750 (but only printed in 1815) by a Christian poet (Beowulf himself was a pagan, but in a Christian setting, as Grendel and Grendel's mother are described as the kin of Cain in a Germanic warrior society, thus mixing Christian and pagan elements) and describes events of the 6th century...
"Paradise Lost" is an epic poem of extraordinary organization and power of imagination, not lacking a touch of irony too, written in blank verse5 (a very unconventional decision for an epic work, as rhyme was the standard for this kind of dignified poetry, as established by the great continental epic writers6) and recounting the story of the fall of Satan and the subsequent temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden "“ another innovative act giving up the traditional heroic theme for a more "human" story, as Adam and Eve are represented in all their humanity, a little bit like the French impressionist painters had shifted from officialdom and war to scenes of ordinary life, and Shakespeare from the traditional historical play to a kind of play where ordinary people are the real protagonists...
The eighteenth century also witnessed the creation of two great works belonging to the traditional epic, as traditions are always hard to die: Pope's "Iliad" and Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Pope's translation of the "Iliad" is the result of six years of hard work, although Pope confessed that his work was nothing compared to Homer's, whom he admired with quasi-religious reverence...
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of the epic and its zeal had almost perished. The few attempts at an epic work were unsuccessful, like Crabbe's, an impossibility of attainment of which he was fully conscious. The old mystical idea of the epic itself didn't exist any more in the nineteenth century, as new forces and interests were gaining ground...
The twentieth century has also produced some significant poetry works of epic scope, like "Savitri" by Aurobindo Ghose, "The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel" by Nikos Kazantzakis, "Paterson" by William Carlos Williams, to name just a few, as well as new kinds of modern epics like "The Prelude" by William Wordsworth (a long lyric biographical poem), "Der Ring der Nibelungen" by Richard Wagner (an opera), "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot, and "The Cantos" by Ezra Pound.
To conclude, I would like to remark that with different objectives and styles, new forms of epics will continue to be written also in the twenty-first century, as we are witnessing in the works of the proponents of "Expansive Poetry", an umbrella term coined by Frederick Feirstein for a new kind of long poetry started in the 1980s and characterized by strong narrative and dramatic elements. Labels: , ,

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