What Happened To Epic Poetry?

The only kind of poetry I really enjoy is the epic form. Generally with a story to tell, and a moralistic, mythological story at that, which presents the ideals and strivings of sometimes an entire people (in the older contexts). The epic form seems to have lost steam in the contemporary world. Much poetry now is more personal, individual, narrow. Perhaps this has to do with the turn in the modern world toward the individual and away from the community. Of course, this cannot be the whole story, because the life and experience (even internally) of the individual can contain that of the entire cosmos in a way which makes the individual's story a truly universal one (Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Homer's "Odyssey" are two famous examples).

One thing we seem to have lost appreciation for in our contemporary context is a love for the universal, the broad and expansive theme, the attempt to construct a justification for our world, and our place in it. This project is to make sense of our lives, and give meaning to our actions. It is, of course, no wonder that this project has lost much of its luster, due to our failure to specify a particular type of project that is the sole human project, our failure in this pluralist society to define what Aristotle calls our telos, or purpose/end. Without a telos, however, there can be no universal theme, no ultimate justification of our actions. Given that the denial of a single human telos seems implicit in our contemporary pluralist society (Alasdair MacIntyre has written a bit on this), we are left in the position of having no coherent epic to tell. Our lives consist of episodes, and are fragmented, with our current goals and their attendant behaviors based on current desires. We seem unable to provide the narrative thread to tie these fragments together. Part of the difficulty is that our society, our culture, teaches us that if we require such narratives, we must construct them ourselves, for ourselves. This is a statement of contemporary liberalism. However, this is to misunderstand how such narratives work in our lives. There can be no single narrative thread making sense of our lives and giving them purpose without a communal narrative. The stuff of the epic is not that of one person creating meaning within a meaningless society, but rather of the individual exemplifying the meaningful narrative of the society as a whole. Just as there can be no drama without a cast of characters, there can be no narrative thread to one's life without a community out of which the narrative is constructed. Thus, the epic suffers its sad fate in our contemporary world. The question now becomes--is there a way to recreate today the communal and the sense of a purposive world on which the epic thrives? Let's hope so!

Anyway--I'm getting into a bunch of epics now: reading through Dante's "Divine Comedy". I read the first part of this, the Inferno, probably 10 years ago, and enjoyed it but wasn't bowled over by it. This time, it's different. I can appreciate the power of Dante's work as a spiritual creation, as a map of the mystical journey of the soul from death to life. It is this, it seems to me, that is the central purpose of Dante's work, as a guide for those seeking God. I can now better appreciate this magnificent work.

After Dante, I intend to move on to Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained", the Ramayana, Beowulf, Buddhacarita, the Norse Edda, and also I'll read again Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha". Look out for reviews!