Part I. Getting Past the Objections

HY epic poetry?” I’ve raised a lot of eyebrows over the years. Curiosity and skepticism about what it is I hope to accomplish. The argument for my cause is surprisingly difficult to thread. In the first issue of this magazine I attempted a partial answer. Like the one which prompted that essay, the question “why epic poetry?” seems to take the position that epic poetry is dead for good and reviving it is a waste of time. Defending it on the grounds it is art, and historically important, seems a cheap way of shying away from the answers the question deserves. That art is worthwhile, and people enjoy storytelling, is taken for granted here—but why all this trouble for poetry? This essay is part apologia, part meditation, and part retribution for those who think the question unanswerable.

To begin, epic poetry is an ancient mode of praising heroic virtues, of telescoping mythology and history. A primeval image comes to mind—a poet, standing while his audience sits, reciting from memory the stories of Achilles and Odysseus. That image was fact for many centuries. The Greek poet, Latin vates, Celtic bard, and English scop recited from memory, very probably in the typical manner we have seen illustrated in books or depicted on film. It remains one of the most fascinating realities in the history of the world. Though poetry has evolved into mainly a written medium, the poet’s role remains a powerful one. I also do it myself—not playacting as a robed and bearded person, but I am similarly compelled to learn from the past and write what I find.

To  return to the question—the skepticism is based on a perceived disinterest in the topic. Now that my friends and I have this magazine in which we publish our work—is the normal reader interested enough to bother with us? Should we be content to preach to the choir of academics and their ilk?  Let those who will hear our song come and listen—true. But there’s a real doubt, even among us poets, about who our audience is and what they are gleaning. The skeptics circle with their reasons: “epic poetry is dead” “this is long and boring and nobody is going to read it” and “the medium of our time is film—why don’t you write a screenplay?”

To what extent these statements should be taken to heart depends on you. But as an overall assumption about the interest of readers and their ability to enjoy something other than the usual—it just doesn’t sit right with me.

Because it is a false assumption. Regular non-academic readers do read epic poetry, and they read about things outside their cultural milieu. Not long ago I met a woman in a used bookstore. Her southern drawl belied her reading habits: she loved biographies of medieval royalty. Lesson learned—we live in a world where books on every subject are accessible to all, in the guise of Penguin, Oxford, and Everyman. Was that not the mission of those particular publishers in the first place? If so, why assume their prominence has not had a far-reaching impact over the decades? It may not be the immediate impact of bestsellers, but it is not nonexistent, and perhaps it is greater than we suspect.

Arthurian literature remains one of the most popular mythologies and a source of inspiration for all kinds of artists. Consider the combined cultural impact of two of the publishing industry’s giants: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Judging from their body of work, much of which is or includes epic poetry or is about poetry, you might even say we are at a cusp of greater interest in epic literature and the root works which inspired them. Barnes and Noble is stocked with all of these. Yes, at first glance it seems a stretch—but why else would those publishing houses continue to put out these books despite more popular fare?

Because they give people a kind of knowledge they desire to know. There’s little hard data outside of the bestseller lists to make further pronouncements, but I’m happy to add more personally-derived evidence. For one thing, this entire (second) issue of epic poetry would not exist if what I just argued above was not true. The remarkable thing, I’ve come to realize, is not that I found so many compatriots online who shared my passion, but that I already had so many friends who felt the same way, and whose verse the world can now read.

For those whose threshold for accomplishment resides in mainstream acknowledgement and awards, I offer the following: in 1990 Derek Walcott’s verse epic Omeros was published and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. John Gardner, whose popular novel Grendel is read in high schools, wrote the epic Jason and Medeia, published in 1973. John Vincent Benet’s verse epic of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body was published in 1928, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and in 1953 was staged on Broadway by Hollywood’s biggest talent.

Epic poems are still being written. People read them. I have no illusions about competing with the likes of Taylor Swift and Kanye West, corralling giant auditoriums of pent-up energy. But I like to think a segment of their fans are capable of engaging, in a different way, with the virtues of the epic, because what it says, if you attune to hear it, may be important enough to change your life.

 

Part II. The Singular Effect of Epic Poetry

OW that we’ve crept past the gatekeepers of cultural taste (unappointed, by the way) let’s stretch our legs and discuss the making of the epic. The would-be optimistic skeptics who say, “just make a movie instead!” are assuming what people enjoyed in the old days were just the stories, and they are partly right. But they assume the mode of epic—meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, allusion, invocation, ekphrasis—were a necessary but temporary encumbrance. They are wrong there. Epic poetry is delicious as itself, for its story, form, eloquence, and on the other hand its invocations of the divine, strange, and mysterious—of being arranged in unobvious ways (Emily Dickinson called it “telling it slant”). Movies can evoke similar feelings, but they are not qualitatively the same. I think most filmmakers would agree.

People enjoyed hearing stories from the bards, to be sure, but these storytellers were adept with their oratorical tools. Their audiences may or may not have noticed, but they were nevertheless left with the afterglow from the striking of the fundamental chord, which is the singular effect of an epic’s telling.

Afterglow is important. We may not remember the whole of Homer or Virgil’s stories, but the mood evoked by them lingers years after the last class has been out of session. It’s the effect created by having heard a good story told in that way I described in Part I. Telescoping history means you see past events and feel them to be closer or further than they are, and measure your own situation in relation to them. The poet’s skill helps manifest these visions in the minds of the audience, making unreal things visible and invisible truths more visible.

The other main point about hearing and reading epic poems is that people most assuredly did not always know every person being referenced. They were not expected to. Just as you do not stop in every town on a drive, you are not asked to immediately attend to every allusion, but to catch onto the myth and poetry, swept up in the flow of the meter. Allusions are the hammering of deep fire into the poetry’s iron so that, when tested, it rings true.

In hearing and reading the poem we measure the sound of the words (there is much to be said of reading poetry just for the sound) and their arrangement determines their effect and memorability. This is the poet’s real magic—the arrangement of utterances of truth.

The following categories are useful to describe these utterances. As a writer I need to be direct and clear, but I also find it necessary to be indirect, or even cryptic. The direct mode we’ll call the Natural Arrangement. It’s the five senses, shapes, colors, science, and most observable phenomena, but also basic emotions—things against which people judge or derive to be true. How far we can categorize is useful, but it stops somewhere short of fantastical. Here we recognize things that are still familiar. If we are told “long ago there lived a woman,” we know it’s possible because our mother or grandmother is a woman. The Natural Arrangement is how we frame our reality as we move forward.

The second half, the “indirect” mode, we will call the Rearranged Order. It is not disarranged because it has purpose. Rearrangement is startling. It may be something made-up and fantastical, or something as typical as a garden, or a house, which are rearrangements that live comfortably within the natural arrangement. Rearranged Order makes the ordinary into the extraordinary, or reveals something hidden. It’s not really a contrast of opposites, more like the negative of a photo or B-side of a record. The song is not unpleasant, but its joy is bridled—it is not the C-major hit, but in a flat key and contains diminished sevenths, the startling, unexpected dissonant interval into our Natural Arrangement. Most of us understand the rewards of Heaven and consequences of Hell (even those who disbelieve in them), but in hearing about Fairlyand we are at pains to explain how it fits into creation.

Under the influence of this combination of Arranged and Rearranged you are transported. People often say in such states your disbelief is suspended—the story is your reality, for the time being.

If you’ve experienced this, you understand the powerful effects of words. It is enough for many that they enjoy the story. On the one hand, relatability in the form of sameness—things that are recognizable to experience; and on the other hand, things different from which expand understanding.

For the poet there is nothing better than creating. In wanting to compose a poem I do not merely wish it existed, I put myself through the physical process of invention—I open those passages through which the beautiful and sublime can be put into words. Readers cannot re-do this process from scratch, but they can, in reading it, follow the path you create in their mind. Like listening to an interesting friend, sharing their experience is part of the process of enjoyment. 

Poets cannot help but relate their visions. Plato’s dialogue called ‘Ion’ is exactly about this. Ion is a wandering reciter of poetry who especially loves the works of Homer. Ion himself is just a regular guy, but when he recites the words of Homer he notices they are superior to those of other poets. How does he know this? Because when he performs The Odyssey or The Iliad, it’s as if the words are coming to him from heaven. Like an actor performing Shakespeare, he becomes the bard’s character, a vehicle for a higher purpose, speaking in a higher language. In Philip Sidney’s essay ‘The Defence of Poesie’ he discusses various words for poet. In Greek it means ‘maker’, but in Latin (vates) it means ‘prophet’. So there has always been a religious or quasi-religious role attached to the role, and to the epic poem which is one of the very oldest modes of storytelling.

 

Part III. Engaging Art

N this final part we are now at the most difficult stage of the siege, for we now must face the skeptic’s strongest point: “epic poems are long and boring.” But, you will say, you just spent all that time describing people who like them and the singular effects they have on the psyche! Yes, I did those things, and they were true about a certain amount of people, but I glided past a point which seemed to go against me, which is: most people who have read epic poems were forced to do so in order to pass their exams.

The skeptics have a point, alas, but—it applies to everything. Forget epic poetry, everything is long and boring in this age. People say they don’t feel qualified to like ‘difficult’ art. Where previous generations learned but rebelled against it, present generations have decided on the odd compromise of respecting its reputation but not wanting to learn it.

This difficult art is not only what you’d expect. Renaissance European frescoes, triptychs and sculptures—works which demand examination beyond the obvious—are of course included in this category. But so are whole decades of film: Renoir, Bergman, Kurosawa—almost everything made in black-and-white—is now inaccessible to a large part of the population. It’s not that they aren’t available, but the tripwires of black-and-white cinematography, different styles of acting, subtitles, the general length of films, not to mention social mores, render them uncomfortable or difficult to comprehend. Worse yet, films in English, in color, and with recognizable names are being thrown into this same category: the epics of David Lean, almost all Westerns before Sergio Leone (and a good many between him and Tombstone), literary dramas and period pieces of the 1980s and 1990s—all these were, in their time, updating literature and bringing it to the people, changed to be in sympathy with the times. And yet, for very many people, it would seem, those works, made in living memory, remain a bridge too far. I even know people who claim to enjoy watching others play video games online, but don’t play the games themselves.

Which is why, when it’s pointed out that people read Homer in school because they have to, I’ve adopted the Marge Simpson philosophy. In one episode of The Simpsons Homer Simpson laughs because the school board is forcing the students to go to the museum to see Michelangelo’s David. Marge smiles—she’s just fought a losing public battle against senseless cartoon violence on the one hand, and advocated the importance of the Renaissance artist’s famous nudie sculpture on the other. So when she hears the children are being required to go she says, “Oh. How nice.”

The transition of art and ethos from one medium to another is not the conveyor of knowledge. Updating is not the issue. “Long and boring” is an admittance of a failure to engage. Perhaps the art in question is terrible and boring—but we’re not there yet, we’re still griping because something is required of us (here in this essay I am student and examiner, requiring answers of myself). In order to gain experience, in order for “long and boring” to transform into a quest for improvement, we must stand outside our own time and look at the root of our knowledge, examine our faults, and find improvement. The questions we each ask of ourselves will be different, but we must shake the tree and awaken the better parts of it, trimming the decadent branches. As in gardening, apathy has no place of honor in creation and enjoyment.

I recently watched an excellent film about this, about the desire to learn beyond ourselves, of growing and trimming and balancing the mind with higher concepts. The film is called Educating Rita (1982) and has a lot to say about the way people regard each other through literature. Rita is a London working-class woman who wants to learn about literature. She doesn’t know very much to start, but her tutor played by Michael Caine soon has her reading Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare, and William Blake. In one early scene, after Rita decides not to come to a college party with Caine, she goes instead to the local pub with her family. In the pub they are circled around the table, singing in unison some bland song through which they feel unified. But Rita does not feel the same. She craves a better culture, a better literature, a better understanding of herself—a higher unity.

The film would be pretty one dimensional if its point was to simply prefer one kind of unity over another. In the end Rita learns the best of both worlds—loving great literature and great thoughts, and valuing the lives of the people around you. At first she feels she cannot possibly bring a child into the world, but later feels the task worthwhile.

But the inertia Rita encountered in the pub was real. Yes, Rita gained her balance, but those around her in the pub were too comfortable, too afraid of the ideas which consider the higher questions of existence.

I’m an ordinary guy with the likes, dislikes, faults, and little losses of memory of everyone else. I grew up with a spotty education and played more video games than was worth my time—I’m not the enlightened guru, crying down from the mountaintop. But every day, when I hear the never-ending playlist of popular songs in nearly all public spaces, I feel stuck in that pub. Did we want this hamster-wheel reality, or was it imposed? Does it make us happy or does it drown out our real thoughts? Have we existed under this noise cloud so long we don’t know the value of silence? Am I the only one who notices, or do others secretly feel the same?

There’s a temptation to say that any art, any book will do for us, as as long it’s part of the culture. Not so. The bookselling market is overflowing with consumer psychology, creating images for the reader to recognize themselves instantly in a closely controlled mirror, which is really a money-monitor system—the books are written for a determined sub-group, and all extra points are discarded. Such publishing exactitude may be a luxury no other civilization has ever had, but what is it we’re learning if the book merely echoes back what you wanted to hear? To know ourselves must ultimately mean more than to remain fixated on the comfortable. There must be enough that is familiar, but even more with which to grow.

Don’t get stuck in the pub. Watch the Kurosawa and the Bergman. Watch The Passion of Joan of Arc or Andrei Rublev. Read the damned subtitles. Don’t take a TikToker or Redditor’s word for it, find out for yourself from real sources. Read the ancients and the Church Fathers and the Stoics and the poets. Engage with the epic mode. Let the feeling of inadequacy fall away as you taste and see and enjoy the fruit of a greater unity.

And by all means go to the pub. But don’t let your soul live there.