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Updated: May 14, 2025
There have been times when he was a sacred person; he wrote Bibles; the first hymns; the codes; the epics; tragic songs; Sibylline verses; Chaldean oracles; Laconian sentences inscribed on temple walls. Every word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity, and without choice.
While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the court of Arthur, and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote of Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk.
This condition will be satisfied by poems on a smaller scale than the old epics, and answering in length to the group of tragedies presented at a single sitting. Epic poetry has, however, a great a special capacity for enlarging its dimensions, and we can see the reason.
But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic. The proof that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to be in the fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however, far more perfect sonnets than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a heavenly accident. But such accidents can never happen to writers of epics.
No great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivable unless the subject has become integrated with the poet's mind and mood. Milton is as close to his subject, Virgil to his, as Homer to Achilles or the Saxon poet to Beowulf. What is really meant can be nothing but the greater insistence of racial tradition in the "authentic" epics.
To him it is credited in Indian tradition; which ascribes the authorship of the Mahabharata to Vyasa, the reputed compiler of the Vedas; and this last is manifestly not to be taken literally; for it is certain that a great age elapsed between the Vedas and the Epics.
The former, as we have seen, relates some of the circumstances of the closing year of the Trojan war; and the latter tells the story of the wanderings of the Grecian prince Ulysses after the fall of Troy. The ancients, to whom the writings of Homer were so familiar, fully believed that he was the author of the two great epics attributed to him.
But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or qualification, Paradise Lost remains the foremost of English poems and the sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, is never languid.
Nor is there such a contrast between the Iliad and the Odyssey as there is between any one play of Shakspeare's and another . Still, I should warn the general reader, that the utmost opposition that can reasonably and effectually be made to those who assign to different authors these several epics, limits itself rather to doubt than to denial.
Emerson says of English names, "They are an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the land; older than all epics and histories which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits close to the body." Dean Trench, who handles words as a numismatist his coins, has said substantially the same thing.
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