"Epic poem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the regulated channels to which they are confined, their force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.[3227] Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... perhaps not much to look at, it is a very great treasure. For it is not only the oldest epic poem in the Anglo-Saxon language, it is history too. By that I do not mean that the story is all true, but that by reading it carefully we can find out much about the daily lives of our forefathers in their homes ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... largely of the negative aspect of the scientific spirit, but it is from the positive aspect that its value is derived. The instinct of constructiveness, which is one of the chief incentives to artistic creation, can find in scientific systems a satisfaction more massive than any epic poem. Disinterested curiosity, which is the source of almost all intellectual effort, finds with astonished delight that science can unveil secrets which might well have seemed for ever undiscoverable. The desire for a larger life and wider interests, for an escape from ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... are still the same, viz., the greatest of both sorts: only the manner of acquainting us with those actions, passions, and fortunes is different. Tragedy performs it, viva voce, or by Action in Dialogue: wherein it excels the Epic Poem; which does it, chiefly, by Narration, and therefore is not so lively an Image of Human Nature. However, the agreement betwixt them is such, that if Rhyme be proper for one, it must ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... periodical print which has appeared for forty-three years since, to which I did not make some application. I have by me essays and fugitive pieces in fourteen trunks, seven carpet bags of trifles in verse, and a portmanteau with best part of an epic poem, which it does not become me to praise. I have no less than four hundred and ninety-five acts of dramatic composition, which have been rejected even by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... wailing does not afford it. Schumann's complex eccentricities have not given it out. Brahms is too passionless. Wagner neglected the piano. It remained for a Yankee to find the austere peak again! and that, too, when the sonata was supposed to be a form as exhausted as the epic poem. But all this is the praise that one is laughed at for bestowing except on the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... (1474-1533), whose great poem Orlando Furioso displayed a powerful imagination no less than a rare and cultivated taste; and the unhappy mad Tasso (1544-1595), who in Jerusalem Delivered produced a bulky epic poem, adapting the manner of Virgil to a crusading subject, and in Aminta gave to his countrymen a delightful pastoral drama, the exquisite lyrics of which were long ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... in Edinburgh to enable him to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh bringing with him Fingal, a complete epic poem in six books. This was followed by Temora, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic bard Ossian; and the new Celtic ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... is it for the pretender to fashion to go swelling into the atelier of a first-rate coat architect, with his ready money in his hand, to order such a coat! Order such a coat, forsooth! order a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, an epic poem. Such a coat—we say it with the generous indignation of a free Briton—is one of the exclusive privileges reserved, by unjust laws, to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... were not at all agreed as to the site of the town which was so long besieged by the Greeks; and certain sceptical spirits even went so far as to deny that there ever was such a person as Homer at all, or that if there were, he wrote the epic poem which has borne his . name so long. Tradition, however, was pretty constant in pointing to the hill of Hissarlik as the site on which Troy was built. Strabo was quite an exception in relegating the town to the lower end ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... learned from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... N. poetry, poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon[obs3], Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry[obs3]. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee[obs3], epopoea, ode, epode[obs3], idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic[obs3], sonnet, roundelay, rondeau[Fr], rondo, madrigal, canzonet[obs3], cento[obs3], *monody, elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal[obs3], palinode. dramatic poetry, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... coming out in a "Second Edition" as early as the Christmas vacation of 1786,[8] and in the end sold their copyright for fifty pounds to their publisher, Charles Knight of Windsor.[9] Canning wrote Nos. XI and XII (February 12, 1787), a critique of the "Epic Poem" concerning "The Reformation of the Knave of Hearts."[10] This essay in two parts, running for nearly as many pages as Wagstaffe's archetypal pamphlet, is a much more systematic and theoretically ambitious effort than any predecessor. ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... literary classes derive those erroneous modes of judgment and of criticism, thanks to which, instead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive, and what it expresses, whether it speak or stammer, or be silent altogether, it is asked if it be obedient to the laws of the epic poem, or to those of tragedy, to those of historical portraiture, or to those of landscape painting. Artists, however, while making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have really always ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... to this book in contemporary records, perhaps the most curious is an epic poem on Guiana, published almost immediately by George Chapman, who gave his enthusiastic approval to Raleigh's scheme. It is the misfortune of Chapman's style that in his grotesque arrogance he disdained to be lucid, and this poem is full of tantalising hints, which the ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... main incident occurring of any importance for English literature was the publication by Southey of an epic poem. This poem, the Joan of Arc, was the earliest work of much pretension amongst all that Southey wrote; and by many degrees it was the worst. In the four great narrative poems of his later years, there is a combination of two striking qualities, viz., ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Romanesque church erected by a famous Bishop of Coutances, Geoffroy de Montbray, with funds supplied by Guillaume Bras-de-Fer, Odon, Roger, Onfroy, and Robert, sons of Tancrede-de-Hauteville, the Norman conquerors of Sicily and Calabria, whose names have been given fabled prominence in more than one epic poem. The early structure was consecrated in 1056, in the presence of William, then Duke of Normandy, a few years before he became the Conqueror. Supposedly none of this former church remains; in fact, what fragments, if any, exist, are doubtless ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... literature of the modern tongues of the Hindus consists chiefly of imitations and translations from the Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and from European languages. There is, however, an original epic poem, written in Hindui by Tshand, under the title of the "Adventures of Prithivi Raja," which is second only to the great Sanskrit poems. This work, which relates to the twelfth century A.D., describes the struggle of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and talked to him; and when the relatives came, prepared to remove the body, they found no Aristeas, either alive or dead. Altogether, he seems to have been a remarkable person. He disappeared for seven years, and then appeared in Proconesus and wrote an epic poem called Arimispea, which was well known in Herodotus's day. Two hundred and forty years later he was seen again, this time at Metapontum, and bade the citizens build a shrine to Apollo, and near it erect a statue to himself, as Apollo would come to them alone ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... a native of Rudiae, was taken to Rome by Cato the Younger. Here he supported himself by teaching Greek. His epic poem, the Annales, relates the traditional Roman history, from the arrival of Aeneas to the ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few of his works remain, and little is known of his life. He is said to have been the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epic poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the second place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... all day by the fire, inscribing "ideas" every now and then in a pocket-book. I think he was writing an epic poem, and I think he was happy in an ineffectual way. He had thin red hair, untidy for want of a valet, a shining, delicate, hooked nose, narrow-lidded blue eyes, and a face with the colour and texture of a white-heart cherry. He used to spend his days in a hooded chair. My mother managed everything, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Can great minds descend to such absurdity? But worse still: that he may bear down every argument in favor of these poems, he triumphantly drags forward a passage, in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathize. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality-this, William Wordsworth, the author of 'Peter Bell,' has ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of faith, bravery, and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Groto, known as Cieco di Hadria, and Hallam asserts that it is a plagiarism (Literature of Europe, iii. 54). A surreptitious edition in 1632 was followed by an authorized version a plagiarii unguibus vindicata, aucta et agnita ab Aithore, Gulielmo, Alabastro. One book of an epic poem in Latin hexameters, in honour of Queen Elizabeth, is preserved in MS. in the library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. This poem, Elisaeis, Apotheosis poetica, Spenser highly esteemed. "Who lives that can match that heroick song?'' he says in Colin ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to us in common life what, in an epic poem, we are accustomed to praise as a stroke of art in the poet; namely, that when the chief figures go off the scene, conceal themselves or retire into inactivity, some other or others, whom hitherto we have scarcely observed, come forward and fill their ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... give a "receipt to make an epic poem," and after giving directions for the "fable," the "manners," and the "machines," he comes ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... expected from a mind enveloped in muslin. Keats caught cold in training for a genius, and, after a lingering illness, died, to the great loss of the Independents of South America, whom he had intended to visit with an English epic poem, for the purpose of exciting them to liberty. But death, even the death of the radically presumptuous profligate, is a serious thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... arbitrary term; and the ancestors whom we are pleased to term uncivilized, may have possessed as high a degree of mental culture as ourselves, though it unquestionably differed in kind. Job wrote his epic poem in a state of society which we should probably term uncultivated; and when Lamech gave utterance to the most ancient and the saddest of human lyrics, the world was in its infancy, and it would appear as if the first artificer in "brass and iron" ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... occurrence the original poem ends: it is the oldest epic poem in any modern language. At a later day, new cantos were added, which, following the fortunes of the hero, record at length that he was killed by a dragon. A digest and running commentary of the poem ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... oscillating to-day. Many commentators still treat it as a curious chapter of old-world history narrated with scrupulous fidelity by the hero or an eye-witness, others as a philosophical dialogue; several scholars regard it as a genuine drama, while not a few enthusiastically aver that it is the only epic poem ever written by a Hebrew. In truth, it partakes of the nature of each and every one of these categories, and is yet circumscribed by the laws and limits of none of them. In form, it is most nearly akin to the drama, with which we should be disposed to identify it if the ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... author of the sensuous and passionate epic poem "Tristan and Isolde," composed a long poem in honour of Mary couched in the well-known terms of ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the chronology of Dr Blair, died in 435 B.C. aged 86, it is evident, says Flaxman, "that sculpture was 800 years, from Daedalus to the time immediately preceding Phidias, in attaining a tolerable resemblance of the human form." It appears, therefore, that the greatest epic poem ever written had been read, appreciated, and admired, for nearly five centuries before the arts arrived at perfection. Then, indeed, there burst a flood of glory over ancient Greece, and names never to be forgotten were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... as good as his word. That very evening he called on Kumodini Babu, whom he found reading the Mahabharata (an epic poem). After dwelling now on this matter, now on that, he ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... remarking that "Homer wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself, for small comings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment. These loose songs were not collected together, in the form of an epic poem, till about Peisistratus' time, about five hundred ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... 'I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not seriously sit down to write a romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... term there are three, between which it seems difficult at first sight to draw a definite line; which appeal to similar feelings, and excite a similar interest, in the different ages to which each is appropriate. These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... reputation for wisdom, and made laws for the Italians. His pupils were about three hundred in number. He wrote three books, which were extant in the time of Diogenes Laertius,—one on Education, one on Politics, and one on Natural Philosophy. He also wrote an epic poem on the universe, to which he gave the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... enlarged our language; and might perhaps have contributed by pleasing instruction to rectify our opinions and purify our manners." It is not that such criticism is false but that it is beside the mark. An epic poem may do all these things, as a statesman may play golf or act as churchwarden: but when he dies it is not his golf or his churchwardenship that we feel the loss of. Put this remark of Johnson's ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... This, of course, will vary with the different modes of poetry;—and that splendour of particular lines, which would be worthy of admiration in an impassioned elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish and proof of vile taste in a tragedy or an epic poem. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Unitarianism—Moral Philosophy Moral Law of Polarity Epidemic Disease Quarantine Harmony Intellectual Revolutions Modern Style Genius of the Spanish and Italians Vico Spinosa Colours Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem Vox Populi Vox Dei Black Asgill and Defoe Horne Tooke Fox and Pitt Horner Adiaphori Citizens and Christians Professor Park English Constitution Democracy Milton and Sidney De Vi Minimorum Hahnemann Luther Sympathy of old Greek and Latin ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... rather an arbitrary and peevish canon of friend Horace. The AEneid, you know, begins just as he says an epic ought not to begin; and the AEneid is the greatest Latin Epic. In the next place the use of Modesty is to keep a man from writing an epic poem at all but, if he will have that impudence, why then he had better have the courage to plunge into the Castalian stream, like Virgil and Lucan, not crawl in funking and holding on by the Muse's apron-string. But—excuse me —quorsum ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... nature. As a narrative of an important and heroic event, it should be simple, direct, and dignified in its treatment. The incidents should be introduced in a natural order, and their prominence should be regulated according to their relative importance. In an epic poem, as in every other creation of art, the law of symmetry ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... (or De Bello Civili), an epic poem in ten Books, from the beginning of the Civil War down to the point where Caesar is besieged in Alexandria, 49-48 B.C. His narrative thus runs parallel to Caesar's De Bello Civili, but it contains some valuable ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... begun to captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have his own word for assigning "some years" to the writing of Tom Jones; it is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the first English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as the ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his courage and integrity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and women, endowed with human passions, affections, and desires, and distinguished only from sublunary beings by superior power and the gift of immortality. We are interested in them as we are in the genii or magicians of an eastern romance. There is a sort of aerial epic poem going on between earth and heaven. They take sides in the terrestrial combat, and engage in the actual strife with the heroes engaged in it. Mars and Venus were wounded by Diomede when combating in the Trojan ranks; their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... translation of the elegant and richly-coloured pastoral epic poem of M. Mistral which, in 1859, he dedicated in enthusiastic terms to Lamartine... It would be hard to overpraise the sweetness and pleasing freshness ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... Ned developed a taste for chatting, and I loved hearing the tales of his adventures in the polar seas. He described his fishing trips and his battles with great natural lyricism. His tales took on the form of an epic poem, and I felt I was hearing some Canadian Homer reciting his Iliad of the High ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... in like manner, the subjects of Charlemagne could not have exchanged ideas with the Goths of Alaric's army, or with the soldiers of Arminius in the days of Augustus Caesar. So rapid indeed has been the change in Germany, that the epic poem called the Nibelungen Lied, once so popular, and only seven centuries old, cannot now be ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the Rhetoric; but ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... had estates of the extent of principalities. Many of the poorer amongst the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... instinct of a child at once condemns. I doubt very seriously whether it is possible at the present time, and in America, to write a fairy story which shall have the true ring in it, any more than it would be possible for any one to write a genuine epic poem. The circumstances favorable to the production of both have passed away with modern times, but the productions are left us, a perpetual legacy of delight and charm ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... grant the wishes of their favorite. A poetical description of the wars he waged with the Cheta is to be found in long lines of hieroglyphics on the south wall of the hall of columns of Rameses II. at Karnal, also at Luxor and in the Sallier Papyrus, and an epic poem referring to his mighty deeds in no less than six ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... charming indeed, yet tantalising. One wishes for a portion of the communicativeness that characterises some of the Indian poets. He speaks in the first person only once, in the verses introductory to his epic poem The Dynasty of Raghu[1]. Here also we feel his modesty, and here once more we are balked of details ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... is characterized by religion, morality, and innocence. The discovery of this happy people, as unexpected as it was accidental, and all that regards their condition and history, partake so much of the romantic as to render the story not ill adapted for an epic poem. Lord Byron, indeed, has partially treated the subject; but by blending two incongruous stories, and leaving both of them imperfect, and by mixing up fact with fiction, has been less felicitous than usual; for, beautiful as many ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... think a gentleman might compose an epic poem without rendering himself amenable to insult, sir," says ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... broke in; his hair was long, his eyes were very wild, He was in truth a strangely-garbed and most poetic child; Said he, "Your plays and novels may all be very well, But I've an epic poem here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... you, dearest Harriet. I have filled my letter with such matter as I had—too much with myself, perhaps, for any one but you; but unless I write you an epic poem about King Charlemagne, I know not well what else to write ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... pages in celebration of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Whitman published his first volume of poems, a book of 253 pages, in 1877; but in 1884 he published "The Rape of Florida," an epic poem written in four cantos and done in the Spenserian stanza, and which ran to 97 closely printed pages. The poetry of both Mrs. Harper and of Whitman had a large degree of popularity; one of Mrs. Harper's books went ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... "volumen," hence our "volume." A long work could obviously not be produced conveniently in a single roll, therefore Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," for instance, were each divided into twenty-four books, and that is why the divisions of an epic poem are still called books, though they are really chapters. The rolls composing a single work were kept together in a case something like a bandbox. The roll was the book form of the Greek and Roman as well as the Egyptian world, but it left no descendants. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... and Broome, was greeted with scorn. Trapp, in the preface to his Virgil, refers to the new French fashion with true insular contempt. Segrais' translation is "almost as good as the French language will allow, which is just as fit for an epic poem as an ambling nag is for a war horse.... Their language is excellent for prose, but quite otherwise for verse, especially heroic. And therefore tho' the translating of poems into prose is a strange modern invention, yet the French transprosers are so far ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... postscript: 'The above is not my writing.' The ballad follows, and then comes a set of notes, mainly critical. The author of the Warning remarks: 'In some collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty, which, I am told, bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following Epic Poem.' ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... subject, sentiment or allusion." These traits are more prominent in Callimachus than in Apollonius, but they are certainly to be seen in the latter. He seems to have written the Argonautica out of bravado, to show that he could write an epic poem. But the influence of the age was too strong. Instead of the unity of an Epic we have merely a series of episodes, and it is the great beauty and power of one of these episodes that gives the poem its permanent value—the episode of the love of ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... their scornful treatment; but finally, by the interference of Athene coming in aid of his own courage and stratagem, he is enabled to overwhelm his enemies, to resume his family position, and to recover his property. The return of several other Grecian chiefs was the subject of an epic poem by Hagias which is now lost, but of which a brief abstract or argument still remains: there were in antiquity various other poems of similar title ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... My authority for this unfavourable account of the corporation is an epic poem entitled the Londeriad. This extraordinary work must have been written very soon after the events to which it relates; for it is dedicated to Robert Rochfort, Speaker of the House of Commons; and Rochfort ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... projected the AEneid is uncertain, but from a very early age he appears to have had a strong desire of composing an epic poem which would be an enduring monument of his fame. And he has succeeded, for this poem is ranked as one of the great epics of the world. It is divided into twelve books, and originates from an old Roman tradition ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... animals or vegetables were better then than they are now. I dare assert too, in defiance of the favorers of the ancients, that Homer's hero, Achilles, was both a brute and a scoundrel, and consequently an improper character for the hero of an epic poem; he had so little regard for his country, that he would not act in defense of it, because he had quarreled with Agamemnon about a w—-e; and then afterward, animated by private resentment only, he went about killing people basely, I will ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... name of an Anglo-Saxon epic poem of the sixth century. It received its name from Beowulf, who delivered Hrothgar king of Denmark from the monster Grrendel. This Grendel was half monster and half man, and night after night stole into ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... "if he is not to be placed in the first rank with Homer, and Virgil, and Milton, I think clearly he is at the head of the second, before either Statius or Silius Italicus—though I allow to each of these their merits; but, perhaps, an epic poem was beyond the genius of either. I own, I have often thought, if Statius had ventured no farther than Ovid or Claudian, he would have succeeded better; for his Sylvae are, in my opinion, much ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... rain are over the clouds are divided in heaven over the green hill flies the inconstant sun. 2. The epic poem recites the exploits of a hero tragedy represents a disastrous event comedy ridicules the vices and follies of mankind pastoral poetry describes rural life and elegy displays the tender emotions of the heart. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... verse, and for several years he poured out in rapid succession a number of dramas and poems which have been collected in three substantial volumes. The tragedy of 'Fazio' was written when he was still at Oxford, and it was speedily followed by a long and ambitious epic poem called 'Samor, Lord of the Bright City'; by three elaborate sacred dramas, the 'Fall of Jerusalem,' the 'Martyr of Antioch,' and 'Belshazzar'; and by an historical tragedy on 'Anne Boleyn,' as well as by a ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Poetry and Painting (1695), he followed Rymer's lead in equating Dacier, the critic of tragedy ("in his late excellent Translation of Aristotle and his notes upon him"[11]) with Le Bossu, the framer of "exact rules for the Epic Poem...." But he disagreed with Dacier's opinions on the chorus and explained away Racine's use of it on the sensible grounds that Esther had not been written for public, but for private performances which gave occasion to the young ladies of ...
— The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry • Andre Dacier
... versatility, his audacity. He had no distrust of himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no reverence for God, to deter him from any attempt with his pen, however presuming. If a state ode were required, it should be ready to order at twelve to-morrow; if an epic poem—to be classed with the "Iliad" and the "AEneid"—the "Henriade" was promptly forthcoming, to answer the demand. He did not shrink from flouting a national idol, by freely finding fault with Corneille; and he lightly undertook to extinguish a venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson |
