Category: Poetry
_As this essay is disposed to consider epic poetry as a species of literature, and not as a department of sociology or archaeology or ethnology, the reader will not find it anything material to the discussion which may be typified in those very interesting works, Gilbert Murra...
_As this essay is disposed to consider epic poetry as a species of literature, and not as a department of sociology or archaeology or ethnology, the reader will not find it anyt...
5. Chapter 5Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life. But life as courage--the turning...
4. Chapter 4But very few epic poets have ventured to do without supernatural machinery of some sort. And it is plain that it must greatly assist the epic purpose to surround the action with...
2. Chapter 2But doubtless the real reason for the hard division of epic poetry into two classes, and for the presumed inferiority of "literary" to "authentic," lies in the application of th...
3. Chapter 3In summary, then, we find certain conceptual differences and certain mechanical differences between "authentic" and "literary" epic. But these are not such as to enable us to sa...
6. Chapter 6But there are one or two poems in which the old union seems still happy. Most noteworthy is Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_. You may say that it does not much matter whether suc...