Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The Epic of Gilgamesh
- 2 Greek epic
- 3 Roman epic
- 4 Heroic epic poetry in the Middle Ages
- 5 Dante and the epic of transcendence
- 6 Italian Renaissance epic
- 7 Camões’s Os Lusíadas: the first modern epic
- 8 The Faerie Queene: Britain’s national monument
- 9 The seventeenth-century Protestant English epic
- 10 Mock-heroic and English poetry
- 11 Romantic re-appropriations of the epic
- 12 Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the modern epic
- 13 Derek Walcott’s Omeros
- 14 Epic in translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
11 - Romantic re-appropriations of the epic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- 1 The Epic of Gilgamesh
- 2 Greek epic
- 3 Roman epic
- 4 Heroic epic poetry in the Middle Ages
- 5 Dante and the epic of transcendence
- 6 Italian Renaissance epic
- 7 Camões’s Os Lusíadas: the first modern epic
- 8 The Faerie Queene: Britain’s national monument
- 9 The seventeenth-century Protestant English epic
- 10 Mock-heroic and English poetry
- 11 Romantic re-appropriations of the epic
- 12 Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the modern epic
- 13 Derek Walcott’s Omeros
- 14 Epic in translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
Epic serves as a bright star towards whose seemingly steadfast light many Romantic poets aspire. And yet Romantic poetry thrives on transformations of genre, on a remodelling of past works in the interests of new, often hybridized forms, resulting in what, borrowing a phrase from Wordsworth's Preface to his poems of 1815, Stuart Curran refers to as the 'composite orders' favoured by Romantic poets. A major ingredient in the new generic recipes produced by Romantic poets, epic is understood by Romantic practitioners and theorists to be a genre marked by its width, inclusiveness, openness - and also by its virtual unattainability in its purest form. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley defines the epic poet as a poet 'the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political condition of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: developing itself in correspondence with their development'. If this complex formulation allows for epic to be regarded as a form that evolves historically, it also serves as an evaluative way of putting the case. To deserve the 'title of epic in its highest sense' (p. 692), Shelley, in effect, asserts, a poem must display an original, renewing creativity which, at this point at least, he ascribes to Homer and Dante, but finds wanting in - among other famous examples of epic - the Aeneid and The Faerie Queene.
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- The Cambridge Companion to the Epic , pp. 193 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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