EPIC POETRY II
edited by Samuel J. Stephens & Nathan Gilmore
Illuminations of the Fantastic is proud to present the second issue of Epic Poetry. With its rich language of simile, high diction, and subjects of heroic gravity and adventurous romance, the epic form remains an exciting canvas for poets of today. Here are six more installments of epic verse, and an essay, diverse in voice and metre. Jordan M. Poss presents the world of pagan Germanic peoples in his version of the hero Sigemund’s beginnings in The Waelsings’ Revenge; Alex J. Taylor returns with The Lay of St. Boniface, the story of the missionary monk to Germany in the eighth century; Alicia Joy Taylor continues the story of the apostolic missions with the The Epic Acts of the Apostles Part II; Nathan Gilmore imitates John Milton’s high, organ-like sonority in The Epic Book of Samuel Part II; With The Loss of the West, William G. Carpenter visits the Puritan England of Milton and Cromwell with a selected passage of an upcoming full-length epic on the English civil war; Samuel J. Stephens’s Opera Angelorum is a poetic tour of the history of literature, asking the important question—can civilization survive without books? Stephens expands on these thoughts in the essay ‘Considering Epic Poetry.’
June 7th, 2023