What Is an Epic? From Gilgamesh to Gondibert

In brief: an epic is a long narrative poem on a great subject, in an elevated style. But the word covers poems as different as the Iliad and the Prelude, and the history of epic is largely the history of poets arguing about what it should be.

The definitions

The oldest surviving theory of epic is Aristotle's, in the Poetics (fourth century BC). For Aristotle, epic shares its subject with tragedy: both imitate serious actions by people of high standing. They differ in manner. Epic tells its story rather than acting it out; it keeps to a single metre, the hexameter; and it is not limited in length, so it can follow several lines of action at once. Like tragedy, Aristotle says, a good epic should have a unified plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, and he praises Homer for building the Iliad around one episode of the Trojan War rather than the whole of it.

Modern scholars add a distinction Aristotle could not make: between the oral and the literary epic. The Homeric poems, the Old English Beowulf, the Finnish Kalevala and the Turkish Köroğlu tales grew out of traditions of singers who composed in performance, using stock phrases and scenes. Virgil, Tasso and Milton wrote with pen and paper, for readers, in conscious imitation of the poets before them.

C. S. Lewis put a version of this distinction memorably in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). He called the poems of Homer and the heroic poetry of the Germanic north primary epic: poetry of a court or hall, celebrating heroes whose deeds matter for their own sake. Virgil invented secondary epic, in which a single hero's deeds are bound up with the destiny of a nation or of the world. Milton, in Lewis's account, carried the secondary epic as far as it could go, making his subject the fate of all humankind.

Two further terms complete the family. Mock-epic turns the grand manner on a trivial subject, as when Pope's Rape of the Lock opens:

What dire offence from amorous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things,

Brief epic is the shorter, more concentrated form that Milton found in the Book of Job, and which modern critics use for his own Paradise Regained.

The conventions

Epic poets borrowed from one another so freely that a set of conventions grew up, and readers learned to expect them.

The invocation. The poet calls on a Muse or a divine power to inspire the song, and usually states the subject at once. The Iliad begins with the wrath of Akhilleus; Dryden's Aeneid with "Arms, and the man I sing". Milton calls on the "Heav'nly Muse" of Sinai and claims to pursue "Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime".

In medias res. The story begins in the middle, and earlier events are told later in flashback. The Odyssey opens with Odysseus already on Calypso's island; Paradise Lost opens after the war in Heaven has been lost.

The catalogue. Long lists of warriors, ships or gods: the catalogue of ships in Iliad 2, or the roll-call of fallen angels in Paradise Lost 1.

The epic simile. An extended comparison that unfolds into a small scene of its own, often drawn from ordinary life far from the battlefield: a lion among cattle, a shepherd watching a storm, bees swarming in spring.

The descent. The hero goes down to the underworld to consult the dead: Odysseus in Odyssey 11, Aeneas in Aeneid 6. In the oldest epic of all, Gilgamesh crosses the waters of death to find the one man who escaped mortality.

The machinery. The gods, angels or other supernatural agents who take part in the action. Homer's gods quarrel over the war at Troy; Virgil's Juno pursues Aeneas across the sea. The term recalls the stage machine that lowered gods onto the Greek stage, and Pope uses it with mock solemnity for the sylphs of the Rape of the Lock.

How the form changed

Virgil. The Aeneid took Homer's forms and gave them a new purpose. Its first half is an Odyssey of wandering, its second an Iliad of war, and the whole poem looks forward to the founding of Rome and the reign of Augustus. After Virgil, epic meant national epic.

Dante. The Divine Comedy is not usually called an epic in the strict sense, but it makes the descent, a single episode in Homer and Virgil, into a whole poem, and takes Virgil himself as its guide. Its hero is the poet, and its journey is the soul's:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,

That is the opening in Longfellow's translation.

Milton. Paradise Lost is the great Christian epic in English, and it questions the heroic values of its own models. In Book 9 Milton says that he was never inclined to write of wars, and to describe

With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights
In Battels feign'd;

He sets in their place "the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom".

Davenant. Milton was not alone in rethinking the form. In 1650, writing in exile in Paris, Sir William Davenant addressed a long Preface to Thomas Hobbes to explain his own heroic poem, Gondibert. He reviewed the tradition from Homer to Spenser and objected to its marvels: the interventions of gods, the enchantments of Tasso, the allegories of Spenser. A Christian poet, he argued, should not use pagan machinery, and a heroic poem should show probable actions and natural passions, built like a play, so that it might teach its readers by example. The poem states the theory in verse:

Poets the old renown'd Physitians are,
Who for the sickly habits of the mind,
Examples as the ancient cure prepare.

Gondibert was left unfinished in its third book, but the Preface and Hobbes's Answer became founding documents of English neoclassical criticism, and the argument about machinery they began ran on for a century. Read the poem itself.

Wordsworth. By the Romantic period the classical epic seemed exhausted, and poets looked inward. Wordsworth's Prelude, published after his death in 1850 and subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind", is an epic of the mind: a long blank-verse poem on the Miltonic scale whose hero is the poet himself, and whose great events are moments of childhood, memory and imagination.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh (1857) is a novel in verse about a woman poet, and in its Fifth Book its heroine argues that the modern poet should stop pining for Camelot and write about her own time:

Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:

Browning's answer to the question of epic is that its grand manner belongs to the present, and to women's lives as much as to warriors'.

So what is an epic?

No single definition covers every poem in this tradition. But the epic has always been the form in which a poet measures himself or herself against the greatest poems of the past, and asks what kind of life deserves the grandest kind of song. Homer's answer was the warrior's; Virgil's, the founder's; Milton's, the patient martyr's; Davenant's, the wise ruler's; Wordsworth's, the poet's own mind. To see the whole range, start with our study guides to the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf and the Kalevala, and read on from there.