The Muses: Calliope or Epic

 In this episode of The Makers Rage Podcast, I'll be continuing my series on the Muses by discussing the chief of the nine sister, Calliope, who presides over the Epic. I'll therefore exploring this vast and enduring genre in literature and its powerful influence across time. From the ancient verses of the Iliad and the Mahabharata to the groundbreaking narrative techniques in James Joyce's Ulysses, I'll explore how these monumental works have shaped storytelling and how the epic genre persists in other media like film. 

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Transcript

The Muses: Calliope or Epic

PART 1

Introduction

Hello, my name is Darren, and welcome to the makers rage podcast. Calliope, or the muse of the epic, originally epic poetry, of course. But in this episode, I want to explore how that word epic has been applied ever since the ancient Greeks first called upon the chief of the Muses to help them conceive what has traditionally been considered the most ambitious of all creative acts, a literary epic. Of course, the early Greek epics began in the oral tradition: writing down the Iliad, the Odyssey, and The Aeneid is what made them canonical – like scripture. Once a community tasks its intellectual leaders with fixing a text for transmission to succeeding generations, oral transmission is no longer required, no longer desired, and subsequent performers of this text, who would sing it, accompanied by the lyre, as Homer would have, if he existed, would take care not to deviate from that authorized text, not to improvise, as Homer would have done, because you are not Homer. 

Anyway, the muse of epic, Calliope, whose name means ‘beautiful voice’ would have demurred, I think, at the epic so quickly becoming a genre of literature. By the time Virgil was writing the epic of Rome, the Aeneid, there was no thought of picking up a lyre and singing it. And Dante may have called his great poem a ‘Comedy’, but the fact Virgil is his guide through most of it attests to his indebtedness not only to the Aeneid, but the ancient Greek epics that inspired it. What makes it a Comedy is purely academic: it has a happy ending. But La Divina Commedia is undoubtedly an epic poem in every other sense. And after all, The Odyssey had a happy ending. In fact, Dante meets Homer in hell, who salutes him as being a member of the club. And when these ancient works became increasingly available in the High Middle Ages and early modern period, a Pandora's box of epics it seems blew open. If you think about it, it's no surprise that after the Roman Empire's decline, fall, and disintegration, the monks and scholars in their round towers and cloisters, who were keeping the flame of civilization lit by copying and preserving these ancient works in Latin and Greek, would be inspired to emulate them, once their own vulgar dialect asserted itself to become a language of nation and Empire; that they would endeavor to become the Homers and Virgil’s of their peoples and their language. 

Homer and Virgil

In Northern Europe, where Latin was the language of the church, the language of the people, most of them anyway, was Germanic. And not feeling so beholden to the strict hexameters of Latin and Greek, Old Norse, Old English, Middle High German, had their own oral traditions, their own heroes about whom epics were sung, and the music of these languages was such that they were better sung with a striking of an anvil than the plucking of a lyre. In fact, Virgil who didn't write out of an oral tradition, but took the meter of another language, Homeric Greek, and tortured Latin into it, chopping and changing to make it fit. One can argue that his greatest achievement was adapting Latin to dactylic hexameters, the poetic meter of Archaic Greek oral verse. “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

Italiam, fato profugus…” (arms and the man I sing, who came from Troy, exiled by fate…). That man being Aeneas, of course, the reputed founder of Rome. Arma virumque cano. Compare the Greek: “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ (“Menin aeide thea”) – Sing Goddess the wrath of Achilles. Calliope, the muse of Epic is never named. Traditionally, it will be assumed she's the one being invoked, these being epic poems. But while her role in Homer is to sing through the poet, “sing in me muse”, to take possession of him, use him as an instrument; for Virgil, who is writing his epic down, he invokes the Muse not to sing through him or to him, but to simply tell him, as a story is told rather than sung, “Tell me, O Muse, the cause; wherein thwarted in will or wherefore angered, did the Queen of heaven drive a man, of goodness so wondrous, to traverse so many perils, to face so many toils.” the Queen of Heaven here being Juno ,or the Greek Hera. invoking a goddess before telling a story must’ve seemed strange to the Northern Europeans, who began their tales in a more familiar way, even to us. 

Niebelunglied and Beowulf

The Niebelunglied begins: “So many epic marvel's were told in ancient tales of heroes fight for fame, their hardship and travails.” In Beowulf: “We have heard of the might of the great kings, of the spear Danes, in days of yore, how those princes did deeds of valor.” And, as I said, in the original languages, no dactylic hexameters to be heard. 

The song of the Niebelung, in the Middle High German of the 12th and 13th centuries, begins:

Uns ist in alten mæren   wunders vil geseit
 von helden lobebæren,   von grôzer arebeit, 

a couple of centuries before this. In Old English, Beowulf begins:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
 þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

I'm sure you notice the first utterance, the “Hwæt!” – it is the equivalent of “Silence! Hush!”,as if this was to be performed in a noisy mead hall. What a way to grab your attention.

Mahabharata and Ramayana

Another famous epic that begins with a single declamatory monosyllable is the Mahabharata, supposedly written around the same time Homer was composing the Iliad and Odyssey. It is attributed to Vyasa, a figure as shadowy as Homer, in the sense his biography is more legend than fact. Some believe him the partial incarnation of Vishnu, and that, in fact, he's still alive. The Mahabharata is vast –10 times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, written in Sanskrit, an Indo-European language related to German, Latin and Greek. In fact, the Greek writer, Dio Chrysostom (c. 40 – c. 120 CE), in the first century CE, reported that Homer's poetry was even being sung in India. After Alexander's adventures, there was certainly contact, and no doubt some cultural exchange. We don't know of the Mahabharata being read in Greece, though like the Greek epics, it too tells stories of heroic figures like Arjuna, Kaurava, and Pāṇḍava. But unlike Homer, parts of it were regarded as sacred, like the Bhagavad Gita, one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism, which along with the Upanishads would inspire TS Eliot in composing his own mini epic, the Wasteland – that bleak vision of the 20th century during the interwar years. 

The beginning of the Mahabharata has none of this pessimism. “Om! Having bowed down to Narayana and Nara, the most exalted male being, and also to the goddess Saraswati, must the word Jaya be uttered.” Om is the mystic syllable, the most sacred mantra in Hinduism. Narayana is an epiteth of Vishnu, the preserver. Nara is the primaeval man or eternal spirit, pervading the universe and associated with Narayana or Vishnu. As for Saraswati, she's the Hindu goddess of learning and the Arts, especially music. But unlike Calliope, but one of nine artistic muses, the Indians would say Sarasvati subsumes them all, as well as being the inventor of the Sanskrit language. Still, it is compelling that one of the great epics of Indian literature begins with an invocation of a divine patroness of the arts and doing so with such confidence in the enterprise that the poet says the word “Jaya must be uttered”. Jaya meaning ‘victorious.’ 

The other great Sanskrit Epic is the Ramayana. But whereas the Mahabharata narrates a family drama in the context of the Kurukshetra War, it is also a compendium of other stories often regarded as separate works in our own right, including an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and is punctuated with philosophical and devotional material, like the Bhagavad Gita. Of course, the Ramayana, which means ‘Rama’s Journey’, focuses on two individuals, Rama and his wife Sita. The Journey resembles what the Greeks called a nostos – the hero’s struggle to return home. Except unlike Odysseus, who was condemned to be a seafaring vagabond attempting to get home to his wife and rescue her from a plague of suitors, both Rama and his wife are vagabonds together, having been exiled to the wilderness, where Sita is stolen away by the demon Ravana. To rescue her, Rama enlists the help of Hanuman, the powerful and magnanimous Monkey God, who is still one of the most beloved deities in Hinduism. Having spent a significant time apart, upon reuniting with her, Rama must trust as Odysseus, that throughout their separation, his spouse has remained pure. In the end, Rama makes a triumphant return. But there is a poignant twist to the story concerning Sita, which will not spoil here. 

Journey to the West

I mentioned Dio Chrysostom claiming Homer was sung in India and speculated if in fact the Ramayana was known in Greece. If so, no literary evidence has emerged. Perhaps the Buddhists inspired the Stoics? Tantalizing but we can’t prove it. However, there’s certainly a suggestion Hanuman influenced Chinese literature, albeit many centuries later during the Ming Dynasty, and that great Simian Hero Monkey in “A Journey to the West.” The West being of course what we in Europe call the East, India. A more preposterous though equally beloved character as Hanuman, one imagines the Indian Monkey God stowed away among the sutras brought back by the Buddhist monk Xuanzang when he returned from his thirteen-year pilgrimage to India, and that over the next thousand years acculturated into the Chinese monkey God, Sun Wukong, who remains popular to this day at home and abroad, and even had a blockbuster TV series in the late 70s..

Gilgamesh

I can't help but wonder what the ancient Greeks and Romans would have thought of contemporary Indian and Chinese epics, or all those European epic mongers who have succeeded them. But there’s no evidence there was any direct influence of Indian literature on Europe until the 19th and 20th centuries. The same can be said about perhaps the most ancient of all the epics: Gilgamesh. More than 1000 years before Homer, Mesopotamian poets sang of the hero King, Gilgamesh, who having achieved all that it is possible to achieve in a mortal life, through his heroic exploits, sought at last to conquer even death. After the discovery of some 15,000 fragments of a Syrian cuneiform in the library of Ashurbanipal, in Nineveh, which is in the modern-day city of Mosul in Iraq, Austin Henry Layard, in the early 1850s, must have wondered whether all he found was yet another large store of clerical records. But this being the library of a great Assyrian king, perhaps hopeful that these tablets recorded something more significant. Once the translations began to appear, it's fair to say they caused a bit of a sensation, especially after an uncannily familiar account of a great flood emerged and featuring an uncannily familiar character like Noah but named Utnapishtim. What proved most troubling is that the Mesopotamian account is far older than a biblical one. And the implication of this was noted on the front page of The New York Times in 1872. Quote, “if genuine, [the Chaldean inscription] may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.” The hero of the poem, Gilgamesh, has been seen as a precursor of subsequent heroes like Heracles and Odysseus, even Samson, and some interpreters believe this isn't a coincidence, and that they are all part of a continuous epic tradition that begins in Mesopotamia, where the first cities were built, and first writing invented. It is a romantic conceit, typical of the 19th century I suppose. The fact early Greek literature emerged at a point of convergence of various Near Eastern traditions before Herodotus and others deemed it exclusively Hellenic, it's not out of the question. The Homeric poets were very likely aware of Gilgamesh, or some version of it, especially when you consider the library of Ashurbanipal was around at exactly the time when the Homeric poems were being written down not that far away in Anatolia. But the idea of a continuous tradition is questionable, and even calling Gilgamesh an epic is perhaps anachronistic. 

That said, even the ancient Greeks were flexible in their use of the word epic: ‘epikos’ or ‘epos’ means ‘word’, ‘story’, ‘poem’, etc. It was only later tradition that restricted the term to heroic epic. And I suppose if Gilgamesh is an ‘epos’ or story about a hero, why not call it an epic? Of course, again, we don't know who the poet or poets are, and there's no direct invocation of a muse. The Prologue introduces Gilgamesh as a man who gained knowledge through exceptional trials, after the narrator invites us to read the account of Gilgamesh’s hardships, and to admire the city walls, the walls of Uruk, and its treasury, which are his true legacy, we have the first mention of a goddess: “Mount a stone stairway, there from days of old, approach Ayana, the dwelling of Ishtar, which no future king, no human being will equal.” Ayana is the temple of Inanna, the Sumerian name for Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven, later identified with the Canaanite Astarte, the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Aphrodite, and the Roman Venus. Ishtar is far more than a mere muse to be invoked at the beginning of a poem. In fact, it can be said she's the main antagonist of the epic, whose plot I won't give away here. But I'll only say that in the same sense, the name Heracles means “he who strives with Hera”, Gilgamesh and his partner in crime, Enkidu, strive with Ishtar. 

National Epics

It wasn't just Near Eastern epics that were being discovered in the 19th century in a period of heightened nationalism. After the 1848 year of revolutions, there was a desire not only in a recently unified German state, but in Ireland, Scotland, Finland, Estonia, Romania, to discover in their folklore and the oldest poetry in their language, an epic tradition the equal of anything produced by the Greeks, Romans, or the Mesopotamians. The Kalevala, for example, compiled in the 19th century by Elias Lönnrot, is still considered the national epic of Finland. The same can be said of the Kalevipoeg, or Kalev’s son, by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, the national epic of Estonia. One of the most influential across Europe at the turn of the 19th century turned out to be a fake: the Ossian cycle by James McPherson, a Scottish writer, who having failed to to discover an old epic In Scots Gaelic, made one up. And told everyone he gathered the pieces together from what he found strewn about the Scottish Highlands, or the Western Isles. Chateaubriand rhapsodized over them, Goethe translated, Napoleon carried a copy of Ossian’s poems into battle, as Alexander did the Iliad. Ingre painted ‘The Dream of Ossian’ and Felix Mendelssohn composed ‘Fingal’s Cave’, all of it inspired by a fake, and this enthusiasm for what was deemed at first a Northern European equivalent of Homer. The realization soon dawned how badly McPherson’s fake suffers in the comparison, and for those who professed to have discerning tastes to be embarrassed. But it nonetheless prompted a Celtic revival in Scotland and Ireland, and an impulse to create new literature, new art alongside the old. 

The Song of Roland

One literary discovery that was most certainly not a fake, is La Chanson de Roland, or the Song of Roland, written in Anglo Norman, and discovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, not long after the abortive French Revolution of 1830, which although it made France a constitutional monarchy, it wasn't the Republic revolutionaries fought and died for in the streets, and would later fight for and die again in the third revolution of 1848. It's no wonder Roland would come to exemplify this martyrdom, having bravely sacrificed himself and his men in a rearguard action against the Saracens after a betrayal refusing to blow the Oliphant and summon Charlemagne to the rescue, despite being greatly outnumbered, because that would be cowardice. The Franks fight well but are ultimately routed. And at the point of death, Roland blows his olifant – not to be rescued, but to be revenged. You can almost hear Republicans of subsequent decades shout in unison Charlemagne’s famous battle cry “Mon Joie Saint Denis!” 

Orlando Furioso

Long before La Chanson Roland’s rediscovery in the early 19th century, Charlemagne famous Paladin was better known in Italian as Orlando, and in the 15th and 16th centuries was a famed literary type of chivalric Knight errantry. Matteo Boiardo draws from both the ancient epic and mediaeval romance traditions in his Orlando Inamorata. The mediaeval romance look some of its influence some Arab and Persian literature and love poetry, which resonated with the tradition of courtly love in mediaeval Europe. The knight’s chaste though obsessive devotion to his lady, not unlike that of a cleric to the Virgin Mary, though this was only ever suggested never stated explicitly for that’s flirting with idolatry. By the time Ludovico Ariosto was composing his Orlando Furioso or ‘the frenzy of Orlando’ in the early 16th century court of Ferrara, romance literature was becoming dated, and whereas Boiardo treated Orlando's obsession with Angelica with high seriousness, Ariosto can only poke fun. For once she runs away with a Saracen to Cathay (or North China), he abandons his duties and goes on a rampage. The English knight Astolfo concludes he has lost his wits. To retrieve them, he must travel to where all things lost on Earth can be found: the moon. So Astolfo flies up in a flaming chariot and brings Orlando's wits back with him in a bottle. After sniffing the bottle, Orlando's sanity is restored, and he falls out of love with Angelica. The lesson: love itself is a kind of insanity, or at least the way it’s depicted in romance, and this shouldn't be emulated. This will of course be later picked up by Cervantes, whose hero Don Quixote is driven mad by his overzealous reading of literary romance novels. 

Spenser and Camoes

In England, Cervantes’s contemporary, Edmund Spenser, took romance a little more seriously. Unlike Boiardo, though, he wanted to exploit the heroic quest narrative to create an allegory that would have a transformative effect on the reader to quote, “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” The key word here is “discipline”. So not the lovelorn madness of Orlando. In Spenser’s romance, the virtues espoused will be those of the of the real fairy queen Elizabeth, and her sober protestant realm, not the over-exuberance of an Italian court. Spenser’s epic is lush, floribundant and ingeniously wrought. A national epic cloaked in the veil of allegory will only ever be accessible to a few. And a nation consists of more than the few. No wonder Milton will take a more direct approach a century later in his attempt at not just a national epic but a Christian One, Paradise Lost. Yet another national fantasy epic of the period, Os Lusiads by Luis de Camoes, heroicizes the Portuguese voyages of discovery in a Homeric registeer, one of the main narrators being Vasco de Gama himself. It opens not with an invocation to any of the Greek muses, but with a prayer to the Tagides, nymphs of the Tagus, which is the longest river in the Iberian Peninsula, thus locating the poem geographically. Why would the national epic of Portugal invoke a foreign muse, even if she did reputedly inspire Homer? And yet Camoes’s indebtedness to Homer and Virgil is apparent throughout: with the Greek gods including Neptune featuring prominently; and even the epic muse herself, Calliope, sneaks in at the beginning of Cantos 3 and 10. Some sections resemble pastoral Eclogues, like those of Virgil, and though it doesn't indulge too much in allegory as Spencer and the mediaeval romances preceding it, it hasn't the realest tone of that other great epic of Iberia, El Cantar de Mio Cid, or Song of My Cid. 

El Cid & Ferdowsi

Cid being the famous nickname of Rodrigo Diaz De Vivar: an 11th century Castilian noble and Spain's national hero. Although influenced by the Carolingian legends like most mediaeval epics, there’s no divine intervention like Gabriel carrying Roland up to Heaven. You are led to believe this is history, not fantasy or romance, and that these people were real and recent. The poem supposedly composed not long after El Cid death. Incidentally, ‘Cid’ is adapted from the Arabic word Sidi or Saeed, which means ‘lord’ or ‘master’. And of course, the Saracens feature prominently in this epic, as they do in La Chanson Roland, and every major literary work it seems produced in Europe after the Fourth Crusade. They are the heathen and the enemy, and yet, more often than not, depicted with humanity, nobility – worshipping a different god (or the same god in the ‘wrong’ way) it seems doesn't deprive you from evincing chivalric virtues of a Christian Knight. Even the great Muslim hero Saladin was often depicted in mediaeval Europe as being righteous and just for his clemency towards Christians in Jerusalem after his conquest of the city; and as being so charitable he didn't leave enough money at his death to pay for his grave. Whether true or propaganda, this certainly colored the European perception of Arab nobility in the Middle Ages. I should say Muslim nobility. most Christians wouldn't have known Saladin was ethnically Kurdish, or that Muhammad was an Arab, or Ibn Sinha the great polymath was Persian. The Islamic Golden Age was a multinational phenomenon, but for most Christians of the time, I suppose it was all summarized by a caricature of the noble Musulman with his turban. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that much of their culture was inaccessible. The same audience who admired El Cid had no idea that a Persian poet Ferdowsi wrote an equally spectacular and more widely celebrated masterpiece in his language for his nation. 

Shahnameh ("Book of Kings") was completed in 1010, not long before the Song of Cid, and tells the story of the history of the kings of Persia, from mythical times down to the seventh century, or the downfall of the Sassanian empire, for which Ferdowsi was nostalgic. Although he wrote under the patronage of various princes and Sultan's, he ends the great poem of 50’000 couplets not with a fulsome encomium to his patrons, are that this great enterprise is dedicated to their fame. No, it is the name of the poet that will be feted, and remembered, quote, “I've reached the end of this great history, and all the land will talk of me. I shall not die. These seeds I've sown will save my name and reputation from the grave, and men of sense and wisdom will proclaim when I have gone, my praises, and my fame.” The song of seed, by contrast, ends with the narrator asking his auditors for wine. The unknown poet has inserted these lines to beseech the audience to reward the performer for successfully completing the narration. In Old Spanish it goes: 

El el romançe Es leido, dadnos del vino; 

si no tenedes dineros, echad Alla unos peños, 

que bien vos lo daran sobre ellos. 

“The Romance is at an end. Now, give us some wine. 

If you've no money, throw some of your belongings over there, 

for they will surely give you some wine in exchange for them.” 

Strikes me as a little presumptuous, but doubtless many down the centuries have thrown money, wine, and their belongings at successful narrators of this famous work. It is said El Cid fixed a Spanish character in literature, in that this has resurfaced in various guises in the novels of Quevedo, Cervantes, the plays of Lope De La Vega and Calderon, and much later Unamuno, among others. And that had even influenced the works of the Latin American Boom, although perhaps subversively. But that's a subject for another podcast. 

Don Juan & The Prelude

Another famous epic, featuring a Spanish hero, was actually written by an Englishman, Lord Byron. And at a time when national epics were popping up around Europe in the high serious town, Byron's hero was a reluctant rake, who couldn't help but be seduced by every woman he encountered. Of course, I'm talking about Don Juan, or Don Ju-an, as he would have pronounced it, and not to be obtuse. It's easier to rhyme more words in English with Ju-an than Juan. 

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
 When every year and month sends forth a new one,
 Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
 The age discovers he is not the true one;
 Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
 I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
 We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
 Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.

Ju-an as a likeable rogue. On like the Don Juan traditionally depicted, first by Mollier; more famously in Mozart's Don Giovanni, where he’s presented as a libertine, a liar, a murderer, and we rejoice at him (spoiler alert!) being dragged down to hell at the end. Byron wants to depart from these usual depictions by presenting us with a sympathetic rather than a despicable rogue. It's no coincidence that at the time of writing Byron's reputation in England was in tatters, not only for his own promiscuity, but due to the suspicion he had a child with his half-sister. And like with most mock epics, he will subvert the epic conventions by starting the poem in the beginning, and not in medias res, or ‘in the middle of things’ as the Iliad does, which begins with Achilles already sulking in the stent. Byron forgets to invoke a muse. So like an afterthought he slips “Hail muse, et cetera”, in at the beginning of Canto 3 then resumes the story. His hero also lacked all the qualities of a hero. Except likability, perhaps. But then many epic heroes aren't very likeable. Anyway, the main character of the poem isn't Don Juan or anyone else, it is Byron. And that's why we keep reading. Epics are also supposed to be serious, full of formal speeches and characters that embody the values of the culture they speak to and for. Few cultures celebrate as a virtue, the habit of rolling out of one woman's bed and into another's; never risking his life for a noble cause, unless syphilis is a noble cause. He never even finished the poem. Because Byron died of a fever before even getting a chance to see action in the fight for Greek Independence. It seems unlike the Don Byron was anxious at the end of his life to risk it all for a noble cause. 

Another poet who couldn't finish his epic was Wordsworth, who intended to write an epic “on the growth of a poet’s mind.” He began it in 1799 at 28. And finished it still beginning at you feel shortly before his death in 1850. It’s full of that “egotistical sublime” Keats described in his work, and it has all the high seriousness of Milton, whom we tried to emulate, but alas none of the drama. It is a long sequence of potentially great lyric poems, but a failed epic. By the time Byron, Keats and Shelley, were in vogue, Wordsworth had become a stuffy Don writing long, boring tomes like The Recluse and The Excursion. In the dedication to Don Juan, Byron writes:

And Wordsworth, in a rather long "Excursion"

       (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),

Has given a sample from the vasty version

       Of his new system to perplex the sages;

'Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,

       And may appear so when the dog-star rages—

And he who understands it would be able

To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

Not to single out Wordsworth for criticism here. I only highlight him as an example of a great poet who should have listened to his muse – Euterpe, I guess, the lyricist, and avoided all attempts at Epic. I encourage you to read the Prelude for yourself and make up your own minds. Between the yawns there are memorable and indeed famous passages. From Book One: 

The earth is all before me—with a heart Joyous, 

nor scared at its own liberty, I look about, 

and should the guide I chuse Be nothing better 

than a wandering cloud I cannot miss my way.. 

Of course, this is echoing Milton in Paradise Lost, describing Adam and Eve after the exile from the garden. 

The world was all before them, where to choose
 Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
 They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
 Through Eden took their solitary way.

Perhaps the most famous passage in the prelude describes the optimism of a generation who were young and “strong in love” in a time of revolution:

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

You can almost hear the Marseillaise! I think, like Byron, Wordsworth wanted to make himself the hero of his epic. But whereas Wordsworth took himself a little too seriously, Byron had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, and that's what makes his narrative more memorable. To me at least. 

Mock Epic

Of course, Byron wasn't the first to ‘mock’ the epic, as it were. There are examples of mock heroic, or mock epic works, even in the ancient world, such as the The Batrachomyomachia or ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice’, which parodies Homer. The unknown poet hedged his bets by not calling on Calliope, but “all sisters nine”. Thalia, the comic Muse, might have been the obvious choice, but you feel all eight would have distanced themselves from a work that marked the literary genre the lead sister presided over. In the early modern period, mock heroic works were being written in prose and verse: Ariosto, already mentioned, was already leaning in the mock-heroic direction. And there was even a reaction against it when Torquato Tasso published his master work, Jerusalem Delivered of Jerusalem Liberata as well as a work on the requirements of epic, ‘Discorsi del Poema Eroico’. As great and influential as Tasso’s Crusader Epic was, even then the high serious heroic style was becoming dated. And with the popularity of Spanish picaresque novels, like Don Quixote, or French burlesque, like Rabelais’ The Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel – perhaps grotesque is a better description of the latter – both masterpieces that influenced writers across languages and centuries perhaps more than any of the high serious verse epics written at this time, because the epic had found a new medium: prose. 

It was a long time coming, even the ancients deemed prose less elevated and verse. Perhaps it's because prose is the medium in which we communicate most readily, most naturally. One must be taught to versify. One must be inspired by the Muses. When we speak, when we write letters to one another, it’s in prose. Even slaves and women can be taught to do that. So, it's best not to insult the gods by treating elevated themes in mere prose. So, bawdy satires like Petronius’s Satyricon, or Apuleius’s The Golden Ass are often considered among the first novels, because they were written mainly in prose. But by the time the novel was taking off in early modern Europe, the printing press was well established, and the reading public, which had never been bigger, weren’t demanding epic poems in Latin. They wanted entertaining page turners in the vernacular, in their own language. And their plots resemble much of what we say on television today. Richardson's Pamela, basically a soap opera, about a young girl whose virtue was rewarded, and about a rake who comes good in the end. Robinson Crusoe, an adventure story, Voltaire's Candide, which could be a Monty Python movie, and a political satire disguised as fantasy adventure, and best of the lot, Gulliver’s Travels. Swift's masterpiece does resemble an epic in some ways, and it is no doubt inspired by the Odyssey. But the tone is very much mock heroic, and while poets like Dryden and Pope, were keeping up with the novelists for a while, the rhyming couplets they deployed weren't very suited to Calliope’s kind of epic. Alexander Pope's mock heroic ‘The Rape of the Lock’, narrates the dire offence a baron commits in stealing a lock of hair without its owner, Belinda’s, consent. Before the assault, her guardian sylph Arial forewarns her that quote, “Some dread event impends.” And everything leading up this event, and the aftermath, is written in a high-flown style featuring gods and nymphs and gnomes and other supernatural creatures. For the stealing of Belinda's lock is a cosmic offence, and mighty contests must ensue. Quote, “fair tresses man's Imperial race ensnare, and beauty draws us with a single hair.” 

The Novel: Tolstoy, Balzac, Eliot

Despite Pope being as famous as a poet has ever been in England, it was clear novels were outselling poems and plays and other literary genres several fold, and though they were deemed frivolous by literary critics who believed they knew better, and Pope called Criticism The muses handmaiden, intelligent men and women writing them knew the potential of the novel to encompass the entirety of the human experience. By the 19th century, novel writing was no longer considered a frivolous pursuit. Although frivolous novels were more popular than ever, the best novels were now being compared with the best literature that has yet been produced, and ambitious writers who dared compete with Homer weren't doing so in verse. And even great novelists who were also fine poets like Victor Hugo understood that to write an epic in the 19th century was to write a novel. This is not to say there weren't some notable attempts in verse, especially in the early 19th century, when Walter Scott for example, was publishing his romances in verse. And Byron before publishing Don Juan invented the Byronic hero in Childe Harold, and though emulated inverse, most notably by Pushkin and Russia, this brooding melancholic romantic hero’s most notable iterations were in novels. Think Polidori’s vampire Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. 

Close on Pushkin's heels, Mikhail Lermontov is writing “A Hero of Our Time”, with his very Byronic antihero Pechorin. And although Byron doesn't invoke the Muse directly in Childe Harolld, saying in the first canto, “Mine (his poem) dares not call thee from thy sacred hill to grace or play in a tale this lowly lay of mine. He uses the rhetorical device of apophasis – a means of giving emphasis by professing not to do so: he might have just omitted the invocation and said nothing, but he had to tell the world he was doing so (like saying “not to mention…” and then going on the mention). But even this anti-invocation of sorts states that his intention is for Childe Harold to be mentioned in the same breath as other epics. Writers after him like the Brontes, Pushkin and Lermontov weren't invoking the muse, but evoking the Byronic hero, the novel being a different kind of literary genre, the invocation can be safely ignored, at least for now. 

In War and Peace, Tolstoy does begin in media res, or in the middle of things specifically, in the middle of conversation amongst Russian aristocrats during the Napoleonic Wars. The author striving after realism forbids such a tawdry factitious convention as invoking a muse. As another Russian writer is Isaac Babel once said, quote, “If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” And yet you feel he's contending directly with Homer, Virgil, and the rest, to write the forced great epic of Russian literature. And so, while not exhibiting all the epic conventions, it does begin in medias res, as mentioned, the setting is vast, covering many nations. There are many characters, some with heroic characteristics, though he would challenge the Greek conception of a heroic characteristic. There are great formal speeches, great descriptions of battle, and other features in common with ancient epics, though Tolstoy would probably say it’s coincidental. Nonetheless, however realist a novelist strives to be, the characters, their feelings, and the world they inhabit are encased in language. If the world could write itself? well, it doesn't. It can't. 

But a novelist can write a world. And it can be argued 19th century novelists came as close as any artist had until then to being Demiurges, creators of worlds for their readers to inhabit. Sure, in other art forms that are works that can be described as epic in scale at least: the symphonies of Beethoven, Wagner’s operas, many of which are based on mediaeval German epics, like the Nibelunglied, mentioned earlier, and Parsifal. But not everyone had an opportunity to see a performance of Beethoven's Ninth or Wagner's Ring cycle in Bayreuth. The world of the novel can be accessed more readily, more cheaply. You don't have to get in a time machine to see Balzac’s Human Comedy, depicting French society between the restoration and the July monarchy. Pretty much the period when La Chanson Roland was rediscovered. ‘La Comedie Humaine’ references of course, Dante's Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. Dante called it a comedy because it has a happy ending. But Balzac’s Human Comedy isn't a cosmic journey through hell, Purgatory, and heaven. He shows us the streets of the Paris he knew with all the savory and unsavory characters inhabiting it. Would Dante have regarded his work on Epic? There’s no mention of Calliope. And it's obvious Beatrice is his muse. And yet, Virgil guides him through most of it, the most entertaining parts anyway, which indicates his intention was to follow in the tradition he inherited from Homer, and perhaps surpass it. After all, he leaves him behind in Purgatory to enter Paradise. Balzac’s Comedie Humaine isn't a single work, but a collection of 91 finished, and 46 unfinished works, some of which exist only as titles, yet the project is considered epic, because of its scale. 

And even today, when books, movies or albums are described as epic, it isn't because they evince the traditional characteristics of an ancient epic: beginning in medias res, having a vast setting, invoking the muse, featuring characters with heroic qualities, and divine intervention in human affairs. It's become something more nebulous, which we associate with scale and ambition, and endurance – does the work continue to influence, to appeal, long after its first publication? Take for example the 19th century novel Middlemarch by George Eliot. It's just a story of several unremarkable characters in an unremarkable Midlands town in England; set in the same period Balzac set his Comedie Humaine. There are no epic heroes, that's for sure. But the author gives us a protagonist she would have us regard as heroic in virtue of her magnanimity and selflessness (not traits we associate with the wrathful Achilles, that’s for sure). And though she had the strength of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she “spent herself in channels, which had no great name on the earth”. One of these channels was her pedantic older husband who wasted her time and potential as he worked on his abortive ‘Key to All Mythologies’. But Elliott says, quote, “The effect of her being on those around her, was incalculably diffusive. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me, as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.” An unremarkable town with unremarkable people. And yet Middlemarch has been called an epic, the first work by a woman mentioned in this podcast by the way. The 19th century for the first time gave women, at least upper middle-class women, the kind of freedom and education to attempt, should they have the inclination, something as ambitious as an epic novel. Although a woman's first duty was still to her household and to her husband. So, it’s no good just being educated, she must have a family that supports this ambition, as was the case with Jane Austen and the Brontes. F.R. Leavis said George Eliot was a novelist whose genius manifests itself in a profound analysis of the individual. Her characters may be unremarkable, but only in the sense that they are believable; unheroic, but fully fleshed out; not having one Achilles heel, but many; no heroic virtues or formal speeches, but an inner world and a soul. If a novelist populates an unremarkable Midlands town with enough of these ‘individuals’, we have a different kind of epic. Not one featuring Gods and god-like mortals, but people like us; characters as real as anyone we've met or might possibly meet; characters we might abhor, others we might befriend, even love. 

And many a reader has fallen in love with a fictional character. Say what you want about Achilles or Odysseus, Beowulf or Siegfried, Gilgamesh or Rama, Orlando or Milton’s Satan, none of them are real enough to us to love or hate them completely. Their inner worlds are never fully disclosed. And although the novel is as artificial as any epic in rhyme or meter, any painting, or symphony, the best 19th century realist novels concealed this artifice with so many utterly convincing characters inhabiting uncannily familiar worlds. And it has to be said that by the late 19th century, if you asked a member of the general public, what a Calliope is, they’d say a kind of steam organ you could hear at the fairground. 

PART 2

Modernist Epics: Elliott, Crane, Joyce

But of course, fashions change, and at the turn of the 20th century, all of a sudden, everyone wanted to write the modernist epic, the epic of the new century. Even the epirc poem became fashionable again. Though, unlike epic poems of previous centuries, these would no longer be trammeled by strict meter and rhyme. Narrative prose gave 19th century novelists the freedom to enflesh and ensoul their characters without the need to keep track of meter and rhyme. And this freedom redounded on poetry itself with the beginnings of so-called “free verse” giving poets like Whitman the freedom to write long lyric epics like ‘Song of Myself’, in which he says quote, “I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags…” So much for the rhyming couplet. And though the modernists would glance back parodically at the winsome iambic line, make it new became the order of the day. After all, who in the 20th century can compete directly with Shakespeare say, who got the iambic line down to a motor skill? TS Eliot, like Prufrock is no Prince Hamlet. Let alone Shakespeare, who gave him the breath of life.

His mini epic ‘The Wasteland’, begins:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

No identifiable meter, no rhyme. And very different to Chaucer’s beginning to the Canterbury Tales, which it echoes. 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour.

(When in April with its sweet showers, 

The drought of March had pierced to the root, 

Each vein received its bath of dew,

the power of which engenders every flower.) 

Instead, Eliot will show us “fear In a handful of dust”. He will imitate Shakespeare, Baudelaire and others, stitch these sordid rags together and give enough annotations to assure the reader of his erudition. He’ll end by quoting Dante's Purgatorio:

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon – 

“I sat upon the shore fishing with the arid plane behind me.” He’ll say, London is an “unreal city”. He will see a crowd flowing over London Bridge and say, “I never thought death had undone so many.” And after saying “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down,” he’ll end by saying “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Then he references the Upanishads, so those of us who haven't given up reading already will know he's come to terms with his post war, pessimism: 

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

“Be self-controlled, be charitable and be compassionate.” He could have quoted the Bible, but that wasn't fashionable. It wasn't new.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

“Peace, peace, peace.” Well, Europe it seemed wasn’t listening. But this was the modernist epic apparently. After the Second World War, it seemed it was time to blow the dust off it to repeat the injunction that went unheard after the first one. And Eliot gave a reading before the royal family, which the Queen Mother recalled as follows, “we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he wrote a poem, I think it was called ‘The Desert’, and first the girls got the giggles, and then I did. Then, even the king.” If you're a fan of the Wasteland, you may be thinking, who cares what the royal family thinks? But historically, poets who aren't loved and feted by the establishment, can at least derive consolation from scandalizing them. But to be laughed at is never the goal. It seems Prufrock had indeed become ridiculous. 

It's safe to say even on its publication in 1922, the Wasteland wasn't flying off the shelves, but it certainly captured a mood. Other poets like Hart Crane in New York, railed against such pessimism. In his response to the Wasteland, The Bridge, meaning Brooklyn Bridge, he asserted a more buoyant vision. And in an idiom that was deliberately archaic, to cock a snook at the ‘make it new crowd’. Ezra Pound whose injunction it was, edited the wasteland. True archaism is a kind of gilding; and since gold cannot rust, the archaic register has frequently been deployed to give dignity to a line, solemnity to a phrase, evoke ancestral wisdom and nostalgia for a golden age in an age of iron. In ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ Hart Crane says:

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,         

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

A more gifted poet technically than Elliot, he nevertheless wasn't as tuned in to the zeitgeist. Moreoverm in 1930m the year after the crash, and the start of the Depression, people simply weren't in the mood for a buoyant highfalutin epic of America evoking skyscrapers, jazz, Pocahontas, and Elizabethan England. Perhaps was written 10 years too late. The roaring 20s was past. He was also unfortunate for not moving in the right circles. The fact that Ezra Pound didn't like his poetry was a disadvantage. Ezra Pound knew everyone. A fine poet who attempted his own modernist epic in the near unreadable Cantos, his greatest achievement was as a kind of impresario identifying the best talent and getting them published. He also introduced them to each other. He was also a fascist who ended up in a hospital for the criminally insane. I read a funny description that he was somewhere between the worst person who was a poet and the greatest poet who was an asshole. Yet TS Eliot in The Wasteland called him “Ill miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman), referencing Dante in The Inferno, where he describes the great Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel as the better craftsman. 

Ulysses

Ezra Pound was also instrumental in bringing wider attention to another 20th Century Literary epic, Ulysses. James Joyce once told his friend, Frank Budgen, that he believed Odysseus to be the most fully rounded character in all fiction. He is a son, a husband, a father, and a companion in arms. He even jokingly credited him with inventing the tank: whether made of wood or iron, they are both shells containing armed warriors, he said. Clearly a stretch. And whether we agree with him or not about Odysseus being the most rounded character in fiction, being a father, son, husband, etc. doesn't make you a fully realized person, let alone a fictional character. And it's fair to say Homer doesn't give us much insight into his hero’s inner world. Perhaps Joyce was being coy, knowing he was embarking on a work that would take on Homer directly, and that his hero would have all Odysseus’s qualities and then some, and that in the person of Leopold bloom, he would give us not only a fully realized character, but a consciousness, a res cogitans, or “thinking thing”, as Descartes would say, in the very act, the flux of thinking, of existing. 

Take one example, Bloom in Davy Byrne’s pub, just before his friend Paddy Dignam’s funeral, considering what to order, quote, “Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendants mustered and bred there. Potted meats. What is home without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's potted meat.” His unconscious makes the connection between the stupid ad and his recently deceased friend, whose funeral he's about to go to, lying in a coffin. Funny, poignant, inappropriate. But that’s the point? The unconscious isn't concerned about what's appropriate. And we see this all through the novel, not just with Bloom, but Molly, his wife, Stephen Dedalus, and many others besides. The stream of consciousness technique just exemplified wasn't invented by Joyce, but he used it most effectively, most memorably, and in Ulysses not only did he take on the epic tradition, starting with Homer, but the 19th century realist novel. What is it about the world of the novel that’s real? It is factitious in every sense, artificially created by the writer and realized in the mind of the reader. You cannot have a conversation with Hamlet, or Dorothea Brooke, or David Copperfield, not even Leopold bloom, though Joyce would appear to give us access to his innermost soul.

They are merely words on a page though a masterful writer can make us forget this. Joyce is a masterful writer who doesn't let us forget this for long. Each chapter in Ulysses has its own technique, its own color, its own mood. It can seem sometimes like He's showing off. Look how good I am with words, with language. And he said himself that he realized when he was quite young, that he could do whatever you wanted with language, and this made it obvious what he would do with his life. Perhaps only Shakespeare had such facility. He could probably order his ale with an impromptu sonnet. But Joyce includes his younger arrogant self as a character in the novel, Stephen Dedalus – pretentious overeducated, someone who felt he could do whatever he wanted with language. We enter his thoughts at the start of the third chapter, ‘Proteus’ with quote “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.” Lush, evocative, and typical of Stephen, hyper literary, but also littoral (spell out), since it takes place by Sandymount strand (a hyper literary pun that would be typical of Dedalus). It shows the influence of the French Symbolists, the delight in elusiveness and allusiveness that would intoxicate Hart Crane, and so many others of the period. But the risk here is overindulging in literary allusion and trying too hard to elude the reader’s grasp (as Proteus for whom the episode is named), and the effect can be to alienate the reader. No wonder Proteus is where so many readers give up. 

But it is in the next chapter that we are introduced to Leopold Bloom, who doesn't think about the “ineluctable modalities of the visible”. He’s a creature of appetite. Quote, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” A sensual and sensuous being who would mock the pretension in the previous chapter. And the tension in the novel between Bloom and Stephen is also between the heart and mind, feeling and intellect. And though the latter threatens to run away with the novel at times, feeling intervenes to rescue it. Initially banned in the States for obscenity, especially for the scene where Bloom masturbates on the beach, Judge Augustus Hand finally concluded the majority opinion with the following, quote, “art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a field is more stifling to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique. We think that Ulysses is a book of originality and sincerity of treatment, and that it has not the effect of promoting lust. Accordingly, it does not fall within the statute, even though it justly may offend many.”

Joyce himself said “if Ulysses isn't worth reading, then life isn't worth living.” He didn’t mean that if you haven’t read his novel, you haven’t lived. He meant that he would include in his novel aspects of life Tolstoy and others would have deemed indecent, improper for a work of literature, like the Muses on Mount Helicon or the gods of Olympus, characters in 19th century novels don’t defecate, fart, masturbate, or piss into chamber pots. Or at least we never see them doing it. Well, Joyce's characters do all these things, and yet you never get the impression he’s has being gratuitous. He just wants to be true. And as Bloom wipes himself with a page torn from Philip Beaufoy’s ‘Matcham’s Masterstroke’, and pulls the chain, you feel he's flushing the Realist novel down the jakes with it. And though in fact realist literature was going nowhere – of the writing of potboiler fiction there is no end – it can be argued, no work of literature has exerted a greater influence on the 20th century than Joyce's Ulysses. Pound, Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, etc. all revered it; Virginia Woolf called it a bore, said it reminded her of “an undergraduate scratching his pimples.” And snobbishly Dismissed Joyce as a “self-taught working man.” But then privately admits in her diary that what she was attempting in her fiction was, quote, “probably being better done by Mr. Joyce.” I think they were artistic doubles of sort. And the influence of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway shouldn't be understated. Interestingly of Middlemarch, she said it was quote “one of the few English novels written for grownup people.” She certainly wasn't ready to flush the Realist novel century down the proverbial jake's. But the next time a novelist would attempt anything as ambitious as Ulysses, was Joyce again in Finnegans Wake. Whereas the former is an epic of the waking life, The Wake is epic of the mind asleep, of the dream world in which we spend half our lives. It's virtuosity, intoxicating; its meaning, inscrutable, as trying to dream another’s dream. It took him 17 years to write, during which time like Tiresias and Homer and Milton before him, he too would go blind. Is the Wake of failed epic? Is it even an epic? Is it even a novel? John Lennon liked it enough to include a portrait of Joyce on the cover of ‘Sergeant Pepper.’ I suppose it was his attempt to write a dream. I think it was a mountain whose summit was lost in vapor. But I still recommend the audiobook, I think it should be heard, not read. 

Cinema

After Joyce, it seemed literary epics became less ambitious. For who could follow Ulysses? His immediate successors like Beckett took a minimalist approach in another genre, drama. Besides, another medium, cinema, was beginning to flaunt its epic credentials. In film, of course, the word epic has been applied to movies in a variety of genres. Early filmmakers weren't beholden to the Literatti and didn’t care if their moving pictures were true to some ‘epic tradition’. They didn’t even care if the people who saw their movies could read as long as they paid and were entertained. And as the new art form became more available, even to the remotest communities on Earth, early filmmaker saw the potential of this new medium to synthesize elements of all the other arts and produce something more gripping, more enthralling than anything that has ever been presented to an audience. It's no surprise therefore many early filmmakers wanted to take the audience places they have never been, or are never likely go, reaching after the grand settling, the great spectacle, which we see in historical epics like 1911s, The Fall of Troy, or 1912s, Quo Vadis, or later biblical epics, like Ben Hur in 1927. Of course, many of these will be later remade in 50s and 60s technicolor. Interesting how quickly artists in a new medium will turn to the classics for inspiration. The fall of Troy may be an old story, but it had never been shown on the silver screen. It's making Homer new, but it's also contending with him. Similarly, early Indian cinema was mining the Mahabharata and other Sanskrit Epics for its subject matter. Japanese Ronin or samurai movies like Roningai in the 20s, or Seven Samurai in the 50s have been called Epics for their historical setting, their treatment of heroism, very familiar in the West, and indeed, would influence the American western, with Seven Samurai, for example, directly influencing the Magnificent Seven. 

The Hero’s Journey

Some critics have said the Western fall short of being an epic because its setting is too narrow in scope. But how many of these film epics take all the conventional boxes. Creatives began departing from such prescriptions almost right away. The most tedious part of any literary epic, for example, is the epic catalogue. In the Iliad, the catalogue of ships isn’t so bad, but Spenser’s Faerie Queen lists a bunch of trees. If you ask people on the street what do all epics have in common, though, they'll say a book or film, or piece of music that is large scale, sweeping in scope, technically ambitious, that tells the familiar story featuring various familiar characters. It could be set in the past or in the future, or in some fantasy world, reminiscent of the past or future, but it's always a hero or heroine and a journey, even if that hero is a guitarist and the journey a great solo. 

In 1949, the American writer Joseph Campbell, published a highly influential book on comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he espouses his theory of the monomyth – a word he took from Finnegans Wake by the way. The monomyth gathers together ideas developed by the anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylerr, and a psychoanalyst Otto Rank; and no doubt JG Frazer's The Golden Bough, which has influenced all 20th century comparative mythology. There’s also a sprinkling of Freud and Jung for good measure. The monomyth proposes a common template for all stories involving a hero’s so-called ‘call to adventure’. The source of this template may be prehistoric, and is based on a simple formula involving departure, initiation, and return. Of course, no one can prove this. But Campbell makes a compelling argument, and his book is replete with examples as Siddhartha Gautama’s call to take the path towards enlightenment and become the Buddha; Theseus and the Minotaur; Odysseus, of course; Native American tales of Coyote and Raven, Jason and the golden fleece, Krishna, even Jesus. And of course, some of the examples I’ve cited earlier. I plan to do a separate podcast on the hero's journey at some point, probably right after this one as an addendum. 

A Catalogue of Recent Verse Epics

Although today, not all hero's jrourneys are epics, nor vice versa. What began in oral poetry and then literature with a set of strict formal requirements the poet dare not neglect, especially the invocation to the muse, lest the poem and the poet suffer ignominy and subsequent oblivion. As the centuries passed, and it became clear that poets who weren't adhering strictly to these prescriptions were nevertheless celebrated, remembered, the Greek goddess fama or fame still trumpeted their worth, indicating perhaps that the Muses weren't so concerned with strict convention. And so, it was possible for a work of prose to be an epic, a film, an album, even a single song, with an epic guitar riff and all the while and even down to the present, aspiring poets look back to Homer and think, could I write a great verse epic of my time? 

As I come to the end of this podcast, let me give a brief catalogue of the most notable examples in verse published in the past century. I may as well have a catalogue. Since this episode is becoming an epic in duration, at least. After TS Eliot's the wasteland, Ezra Pound's ‘Cantos’ are notable. Although also near unreadable, and clearly inspired in part by Dante, with sections featuring his barely disguised literary persona conversing with ghosts of Italy's past. There's ‘The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún’ by JRR Tolkien, published in the 30s; and unlike Lord of the Rings, composed in verse, and recalling the poetic Edda, and other Germanic epics. There is ‘The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel’, by the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis, published just before World War 2. So, 3000 years after the events depicted in the original Odyssey, in Kazantzakis’s sequel, Odysseus has grown tired of his quiet family life and decides to depart for new adventures. There’s ‘The Bridge’ of course by Hart Crane, already mentioned. And ‘Paterson’, by William Carlos Williams, which responds to Eliot's ‘the wasteland’ and Pound’s ‘Cantos’, and most significantly, perhaps, his reading of Joyce's Ulysses; for he said himself that in the work he wants to do for Paterson, New Jersey, what Joyce had done for Dublin, Ireland. 

In Nepal, we have the ‘Sugata Saurabha’ by Chittadhar Hridaya, who went to prison for writing a poem in his mother tongue, and while in prison, responded by writing an epic poem in his mother tongue on scraps of paper which his sister smuggled out when she brought him some food. In 19 chapters of Nepali verse, He relates the Buddha's life from birth to enlightenment to death. ‘Sugata Saurabha’ means ‘the fragrant law of the Buddha’. Two poems written in Hindi in the 50s, just after Indian independence, the ‘Rashmirathi’ by Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar’ and ‘Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol’ by  Sri Aurobindo Gose. Both respond to the great Mahabharata as Kazantzakis did with the Odyssey, exemplifying a common theme in 20th century literature of modern poets endeavoring to continue a literary tradition while reconnecting and responding to foundational texts from their ancient past. At the same time, in 50s America, we have the ‘Maximus’ poems by Charles Olson, probably inspired by Pound's Cantos, and equally unreadable: an attempt to explore American history through the eyes of a Roman period Greek name Maximus. Olson appears to be attempting to interpret American literature as a continuation of that ancient tradition. 

With the 60s and 70s the arts take a postmodern tone. And one of the ways this manifests I suppose is that the epic is applied to erstwhile ‘unsuitable’ modes, even profane, like James Merrill's 560 Page epic inspired by seances and the Ouija board, called ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’. James Merrill, son of Charles E. Merrill, the founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm. Perhaps this is the kind of epic the son of a billionaire produces, who never had to work a day in his life, or perhaps I’m being a little too dismissive. He was a fine poet, and produced some notable, shorter works. Solzhenitsyn, who seems to have gotten a lot written while in the gulag, wrote ‘Prussian Nights’, about the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers on the German people at the end of World War Two – repaying them in kind, it seems, blood for blood, tooth for tooth, becoming the very monster they were in the process of defeating. One feels Calliope took a backseat for this one. The Kristubhagavatam by P. C. Devassia gives us a kind of syncretism of East and West, at least of Eastern and Western religion: an epic poem, written in Sanskrit, about the life of Jesus, published in 1977. Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate is a long poem inspired by a translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and written in Onegin Stanzas, but about a group of 1980s yuppies in San Francisco. Emperor Shaka the Great is a South African epic, based on the Zulu oral tradition, yet written in English, and in the mid to late 20th century, this is how empires are striking back: not just by endeavoring to write great literature in their own language, but in making the language of their masters speak to their experience; in fostering it to fit their palate, they made a new literature and sent it abroad in embassage, striking back in literature more successfully than they ever could with arms. This of course is evident with the Latin America boom’s impact on Spanish literature in the 20th century. In English, Africa, India, were beginning to strike back, and which the United States, Canada, and Ireland had been doing for at least the previous 200 years. 

Omeros

In the Caribbean, though, English had long been fitted to a colorful palate, but only in the 20th century, did great literature emerge from it. 

O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros,
 as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun
 gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.

There is no clear indication of the muse of Helicon in Derek Walcott's Caribbean epic and forgive me if I don't try to imitate his St. Lucian lilt. But it is the moan of the conch that he invokes, the sound of the sea, that great sweet mother, who's white surf circles the island like a pearl necklace. And in the 18th century, St. Lucia was called the Helen of the West Indies, because the island was always changing hands between the English and the French, who fought over it due to its strategic location. By calling his epic Omeros, he's reclaiming the name, the true name of that first great epic Bard. His name wasn't actually Homer – Homer is an Amish farmer from the 1930s; Homer is that cartoon buffoon who works at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. The man to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey has been traditionally attributed was called by the Greeks, ‘Omeros’. 

and O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer 

was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, 

os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes

and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.

I wanted to end with Walcott’s Caribbean epic, because, in my opinion, it's the best of the most recent attempts at an epic in verse. 

1990 may not seem too recent, but nothing close has been written since. And it did win its author a Nobel Prize (though I have my reservations about some of the more recent recipients in Literature, but that’s another episode). 1991 was the year I moved from the Aruba in the Caribbean to Ireland. So when I encountered Omeros for the first time 20 years later, it was like seeing a familiar landscape in a medium I'd come to associate with more temperate isles. English had always been a forced language for me. But I had to come to Ireland to learn it's poetry. And ironically, it was in Ireland, that I learned the poetry of the Caribbean. Besides its lush tropical evocations, Walcott's is a tale as old as time, a rivalry between two men, Achille and Hector, who compete for the love of Helen. There is also a wounded fisherman named Philoctete, inspired by the mythical Philoctetes, about whom Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays now lost; he’s also mentioned in Book Two of Homer's Iliad as having been abandoned on the island of Lemnos because the wound that was caused by a snake bite began to fester and stink. There are characters representing the Empire on which the sun was setting – the English major Plunkett and his Irish wife, Maud. 

My own mother’s name is Margaret, a version of the name Maud. And of course, the poem reminded me of the place I was born, and the place I ended up after my parents’ divorce. I discovered the Arawaks dwelt on both St. Lucia and Aruba, but they didn't know the islands by those names, as the Greeks didn't call Omeros Homer, but Iguana is derived from an Arawak word; and on both these islands, despite their lost original names, the Iguana can still be found, quote:

But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale

The rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,

Its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail

Moving with the island. The split pods of its eyes

Ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries

That rose with the Aruacs’ smoke till a new race

Unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.

These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space

For a single God where the old gods stood before.

This is Milton soaring above the Aonian mount, or the Modernists making of the past a souvenir (to paraphrase Wallace stevens). Calliope may no longer be invoked, her name almost forgotten with the pillars that fell, but the Epic persists like that blue space each generation wants to fill with its own gods, as if the gods are created for our stories instead of our stories for the gods