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Updated: May 27, 2025
Elaborate descriptions, it is true, of natural scenery are very rare, for the reason that, in this energetic age, the novels and the lyric or epic poetry had something else to deal with.
He tells us that the first beauty of an epic poem consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers; now the words are the coloring of the work, which in the order of nature is last to be consider'd.
Both Tasso and Camoens clearly join on to the main epic tradition: Tasso derives chiefly from the Aeneid and the Iliad, Camoens from the Aeneid and the Odyssey. Tasso is perhaps more Virgilian than Camoens; the plastic power of his imagination is more assured.
The hundred sons of their rival, the blind king Dhritarashtra, are dead and with a sense of tragic futility, the epic ends. It is as an actor in this tangled drama that Krishna appears. Alongside the Pandavas and the Kauravas in Northern India is a powerful people, the Yadavas. They live by grazing cattle but possess towns including a capital, the city of Dwarka in Western India.
Carrying with them the traditions of their race and the war-songs of their bards to the very scenes where the famous deeds of their forefathers had been performed, these local circumstances awakened a fresh interest in the old legends, and epic poetry took a new start, a bolder character, a loftier sweep, a wider range.
But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead, and therefore peace be to the Manes of his Arthurs. I will only say that it was not for this noble knight that I drew the plan of an Epic poem on King Arthur in my preface to the translation of Juvenal.
"La figure, c'est l'homme"; there, at any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism. And, however pretentious the poem may be, it undoubtedly does make a passionate effort to develop the significance which Milton had achieved; chiefly to enlarge the scope of this significance. It has already been remarked that the ultimate significance of great drama is the same as that of epic.
But whether it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he drank on his Welsh rambles—and has not “Wild Wales” been called “The Epic of Ale?”—or his associations with the great fighting-men of his day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the men. “Why should I hide the truth?” he asks, when telling of his presence when a boy of fourteen at a prize-fight which took place near Norwich.
It is not requisite, for the honor of Joanna, nor is there, in this place, room to pursue her brief career of action. That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part of her story: the intellectual part is, the saintly passion of her imprisonment, trial, and execution. But this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt, from the constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic unity.
Noble as are the "most blessed conditions" of "the gentle Desdemona," he is yet the nobler of the two; and has suffered more in one single pang than she could suffer in life or in death. But if Othello be the most pathetic, King Lear the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth.
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