12 Metaphors for epics

The epic, the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation and a civilization; the novel, of a neighborhood and a generation.

The epic, whether "literary" or "authentic," is a single form of art; but it is a form capable of adapting itself to the altering requirements of prevalent consciousness.

The main historical sources for this period have been translated by Achilles Fang, The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, Cambridge, Mass. 1952; the epic which describes this time is C.H. Brewitt-Taylor, San Kuo, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Shanghai 1925.

An easy way to define epic, though not a very profitable way, would be to say simply, that an epic is a poem which produces feelings similar to those produced by Paradise Lost or the Iliad, Beowulf or the Song of Roland.

We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be the essential proof that a people is alive and has something to express.

Tasso's epic, with all its faults, is a noble production, and justly considered one of the poems of the world.

The old epics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, though Euripides set a bad example in his Hippolytus, and still more his Aeolus, the coarse incestuous passion of which was particularly admired and imitated by the later writers.

It seems clear also that the epic was an Aeneid, with Julius Caesar in the background, and that parts of the early epic were finally merged into the great work of his maturity.

Thus it would appear that in the three great departments of poetry,the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic,the old Greeks were great masters, and have been the teachers of all subsequent nations and ages.

An epic is not even a re-creation of old things; it is altogether a new creation, a new creation in terms of old things.

The songs of the bards were songs of battle; the great Irish epic of antiquity was the Táin Cúalnge, or Cooley Cattle-raid, and it is full of combats and feats of strength and prowess.

appeared!The Epics are not poems, so much as metrical romances.

12 Metaphors for  epics