Epic Poetry: Some Features and Examples

Epic Poetry Some Features and Examples

An Introduction To Epic

An epic also called heroic poem is a verse narrative usually long which deals with a serious subject. It is told in a formal and elevated style. It is centred on heroic or quasi-divine figures on whose action depends the fate of a tribe, a nation or the entire human race as in the instance of John Miltonโ€™s The Paradise Lost. Epics maybe traditional or literary.Traditional epics are called folk epics. The traditional epics were the written version of oral poems about a tribal or national hero during a warlike age. Among these are the Iliad and

Odessey that are attributed to Homer, the Greek poet. Literary epics were composed in deliberate imitation of the traditional epics. Virgilโ€™s Latin poem the Aeneid is of this kind.

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This epic later served as a model for Miltonโ€™s Paradise Lost.

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Some features of epics

The hero of an epic is a figure of great national importance. In the Iliad, the hero is the Greek warrior Achilles, who is the son of the sea nymph Thetis, and Virgilโ€™s Aeneas is the son of the goddesses Aphrodite.

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

Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin and in Book XI he descends into the underworlds as does Virgilโ€™s Aeneas.

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

The Epic Conventions

The narrator starts by stating his argument for epic theme, invokes a muse or guiding spirit to inspire him in his great undertaking.
The narrative begins in media-res or in the middle of the story. There are catalogs of some of the main characters introduced in a formal detail The term epic is often applied to narratives that differ from this model in many respects but manifest the epic spirit and grandeur in the scale, scope and profound human significance of their subject. In this broad sense Danteโ€™s โ€œDivine Comedyโ€ and Edmund Spencerโ€™s โ€œThe Fairie Queeneโ€ are often called epics.

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