Epics have always been thought of as tales of heroic deeds, but that is really a narrow view. Not all epics are heroic in nature. You can also have epics of time, epics of place, and other types of epics as well. But most epics are long narratives. Even if the poetry is lyrical in nature as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” there is still a narrative strain throughout the poem. It is an essential characteristic of an epic in my mind. The narrative is meant to tell a story.

An epic poem, however, need not be long. Homer’s Iliad and Oddyssey, of course, are epics. The Aeneid and The Divine Comedy are epics, but so is Kubla Khan. And as far as epics go, Kubla Khan isn’t very long.

But just because a poem is long and narrative in nature, that doesn’t make it an epic. An epic must also possess some significant cultural myth. I don’t mean myth in a “non-true” sense. A myth may very well contain some truth, but it is a story of a culture’s core beliefs. And an epic tries to tap into that in some way. The culture can be a local culture or it may very well be a global culture, but whatever is the common myth of that culture, that is the backbone of the epic story for that culture. An epic poem plays into that whereas a narrative poem may just seek to provide an anecdote or to give readers a glimpse into a slice of life or a person’s character. Or it may be an essay on the human condition.

Epics do not generally content themselves with being narrative myths. They tend to explore what is spectacular about the common myth and may be take a myth and “blow it up” so that it can be seen with great glory or scrutiny. The narrative poem only wants to be good at sharing a tale.

Many modern narrative poems are not epics. They may be very good long narratives, but they aren’t epics. And this is not to say that an epic need be in some traditional form or structure. An epic may very well be experimental in nature, or contain experimental elements. Of course, this can also be a prominent feature of a long narrative poem except that the epic contains the elements of the common myth, which the long narrative may not strive for.

Whether a poem is an epic or a long narrative non-epic poem, it must be judged within the school or movement to which its author subscribes as well as be treated as an individual poem in its own right. For this reason, a poem may be considered an epic if it follows the traditions of one school and not an epic if it falls into another movement. That is, if, say, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” were rewritten as a New Formalist poem then it wouldn’t be considered an epic at all, but as a Postmodern reflection of art it could very well be classified as an epic of self, or an epic ekphrastic poem.

To be sure, there is some crossover between the two forms. An epic by definition is a long narrative. Many long narratives are epics. But the classification of each may be disputed among poets from various schools and traditions. I am a firm believer that a strong epic is the highest achievement that a poet of any culture can create. A successful epic is a blessing to its audience.

Aside from technology, however, there will be other significant factors influencing how poetry is published (as well as other forms of literature) and that will affect the nature of the epic. Some of those influences are outlined below.

If you’ll pardon another digression, this post marks the first anniversary of the World Class Poetry Blog and is the 367th post for this blog. That means, despite the days that I’ve missed posting over the course of the past year, I’ve made enough multiple posts in a single day to have averaged more than one post per day since last September. How fitting it is, I believe, to be discussing the future now.

The Future Of Poetics Through The Past
I think I’ve made it clear by now that the future is dependent upon the past. We’ve discussed the pre-literates briefly, the literate age of poetry not quite enough, and the future of technology. What I didn’t discuss enough in the last post was the future of the epic, but it was necessary to lay the groundwork by discussing the technology that will be integral to the lifestyle of poetics.

If technology is useful in creating and marketing poetry then it seems logical that technologies of the future will change the way in which poetry is written, especially if those technologies are drastically different than the technologies of the past. The question is, how will poetry change? In particular, how will the epic change?

I believe epic poetry of the future will be starkly different from epic poetry of past, but it will not be disconnected from the past. Future epics will use the technology of the future to deliver a creation that will stand on the foundations of poetic traditions yet still stand on its own, somewhat like the way young adults carry on the traditions of their lineage while making those traditions new for themselves and their children.

One important way that future epics will survive the traditions of the past is to get back to the basics of good, honest storytelling. I’m talking about the type of storytelling that the pre-literates enjoyed – heroic tales with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The novel has been able to maintain that basic structure even while re-inventing itself, but poetry has largely gone off on its own like a wayward son. When poets do tell stories it is done mostly through short forms and long narratives, but not epics. The few real epics we’ve seen in recent years have, with few exceptions, been esoteric tales or they’ve been deviations from basic storytelling.

That isn’t to say, however, that the avant-garde strain of poetry that was dominant for much of the 20th century will die. It will live on, but it will live as a flavoring option rather than as a dynamic on its own. While epic poems will strive to return to the roots of basic storytelling, poets will still employ the avant-garde elements that have caught on as a result of the Imagist and Realist schools, the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Postmodernism, Language Poetry, and various other 20th century movements. But those elements won’t be the dominant themes.

I’ve mentioned the splintering within 20th century poetics, which has led to a convoluted cross-pollination between the avant-garde strain and the mainstream strain of poetics and their various offspring. We’ve arrived at a place today where the two strains have fed off of each other and as their divergences have widened, the convergences have strengthened. This marriage between leaving the nest and keeping it within the family will continue to be the dominant movement for the next century, but it will largely be played out in digital media with some print implications.

How Might Digital Epics Look?
We have yet to tap into the new technologies and make the best use of them. The human imagination has not yet caught up with the technology that has emerged from scientific tinkering. But we are getting there.

One of the ways in which the Language School has been influential is in the co-creation process. Language School poetics insists on the reader being a co-creator with the poet, but the Language School poets have also been great collaborators. This has largely been due to the fusion of political socialism into the form itself. Language School innovators are all collectivists and believe that the act of creation itself is a communal action. In print, that co-creation and collaboration process doesn’t match up with the philosophy, but in hypertext and cyberspace it does so much more perfectly.

Not only can individuals from different backgrounds easily work together online, but they can do so in ways that it is impossible to do with print technology. One example of how individuals can work together is through wiki technology. Wikipedia is the most prominent example. Through one simple technology, poets from competing backgrounds can partner under one creation, changing each other’s additions, adding to the creation as a whole, deleting previous entries, and participate in co-creation in real time.

If you can imagine an epic poem written in wiki by a collaboration of different people from various backgrounds (even cross-culturally) then you are following me as you should. But would it work? Well, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. If it did work, the collaborators could then convert the digital experiment to print and market the creation by traditional means.

One thing you can do with digital technology that you cannot do in print is create multimedia incorporating audio and video with traditional storytelling techniques. This could work for prose as well as poetry, but in the epic category you could have a hypertext poem, a long narrative story with the basic structure – beginning, middle, and end – and include throughout, at various places, an audio file or short video presentation to show the action being depicted by the text. I can easily envision a several thousand page HTML document that is written like a traditional narrative and on each page a video clip of the action on that page then at the end of the document a full video where all the clips are combined into a complete movie presentation. Instead of creating a movie based on a full-length prose or poetry manuscript, or vice-versa, the creators can go for simultaneous production and charge admission to the website.

This elevates poetry to the realm of entertainment, which is where it belongs anyway. Before the 20th century, poetry was considered an entertainment form. There was no TV or radio so the forms of entertainment were limited. One of the ways that people sought to entertain themselves was to read and in many families there was at least one person who could read that would entertain the rest by gathering everyone together around a campfire or in the barn getting lost in their favorite stories. Often, this was done with a book of verse.

When the 20th century came around with its modern technologies and scatter-brained diversions, people got away from reading and spent more time driving, flying, watching movies, and engaging themselves in other activities that did not require books. As a result, we have a society of people who have gone their entire lives without reading a single book through to the end. The 21st century doesn’t look promising to bring that to an end.

But people are reading more as a result of the Internet. They may not be reading books, but they are reading text. E-mail, web pages, blogs, and other digital media have become common reading material even for people who would never pick up a book. Still, there are many people who would rather watch a video or listen to an audio recording than to read the text, and that’s why poetry in the 21st century has the potential to reach many more people than the poetry of the 20th century.

Poetry As Entertainment, Not Merely A Possibility
The popular poetries of the past have almost all been seen as a form of entertainment. Shakespeare wrote great plays, both tragic and comic, but they were written as poetry. Edgar Allan Poe gained a popular following overseas as well as in his native America, primarily because audiences found his poems eerie and entertaining. “The Raven”, in particular, was very popular during his lifetime. Robert Service in the 20th century made millions of dollars entertaining audiences with his poetry in a time when readership of poetry was in decline and when the poetry that was being written was flying off the obscurity scale into poetic oblivion at the speed of light. When poetry did aspire to entertainment it was largely because poets were entertaining themselves as they wrote by injecting silliness or obscure references into the poetry in a masturbatory fashion. Not many others got much out of it. That kind of poetry is like having sex with yourself while others watch through a peephole.

21st century poetry will have to get back to being reader-centric and one of the ways that it will do that is through visual presentation. Even when it borrows from the obscure it will do so in such a way that it serves as an enhancement to the simple and easy-to-digest. But always, the chief aim will be to provide entertainment to the audience.

The Types Of Epics That Will Emerge In The 21st Century
As stated before, the epic poetry of the future will stay connected to the epic poetry of the past. Therefore, the traditional epic structures will not disappear. But new epic structures will emerge and I think we’ll see a blending of the types of epics as well. Here is an incomplete list of epic forms and their possibilities:

• Heroic Epic – People still love heroes. The story of a larger-than-life hero with a great story to tell will never die. Not even in poetry.
• The Epic Adventure – Sometimes it isn’t the hero that provides the story. It is the event. Man against beast, man against nature, man against himself – all the classic story lines will continue even as new structures develop.
• Epic Of Place – Yes, even the 21st century will have its Paterson’s.
• Epic of Time – An epic of time, like an epic of place, is an epic concerned with one particular culture during a specific period of time. It could be a future time, a time in the past, or the present, but the time period must be an integral part to the story. It could even involve some element of time travel, which would make the epic a science fiction or speculative fiction poem, or it could involve flashbacks; any element or device that can be found in poetry or fiction is allowed as long as time is central to the epic story.
• Epic of Form – Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an epic of form is an epic whose form is a principal part of the work.
• National Epic – An epic that seeks to tell the story of a particular nation and its ideals through the characters and events.
• The Personal Epic – A personal epic is an epic poem whose chief character is the author himself and can be written in several different styles. It can be reflective as in the case of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait In A Complex Mirror or it can double as an epic of place or epic of time. A personal epic could have characteristics of other types of stories as well such as the confessional poem made popular by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.
• Science Epic – A science epic is a story whose primary theme deals with scientific concepts. Frederick Turner’s Genesis is a good example of what I’d call a science epic. You could just as well break it down into a sub-genre of ecological epic.
• Cross-Cultural Epic – Surpassing the national epic, I believe there is plenty of room for individuals from different cultural backgrounds, even cultures that are traditionally antagonistic toward each other – collaborating on a story whose chief themes deal with intercultural issues. This could also refer to a single-author epic poem dealing with a similar theme.
• Language Epic – An epic poem whose primary theme is to deal with the uses and complexities of language.
• Visual Epic – An epic whose principal characteristics are visual elements – could be textual or video-based.

There are virtually no limitations on epic form, but epic structures are not as free. There are general trends, as noted in my discussion on the literate age, regarding the development of the epic structure over time. While I see more experimentation in this area for future epics, I do think that there will still be recognizable trends. I doubt that we’ll see a resurgence of iambic pentameter for a complete epic, but I do see some potential for new metrical structures as well as a mashing up metrical structures for the epics of the future. We’ll likely see a return to rhyme and meter, but it won’t look like 17th century rhyme and meter. It will look like 21st century meter and it’s entirely possible that epics will play around with metrical elements in such a way that different characters speak with different meters and pitches and story pacing can be controlled in similar ways. Whatever the case, I think meter will be one area where the epics of the future will do a lot of experimenting.

Conclusion
I hope this clarifies my thoughts from the last blog post on this subject. I know this is very sketchy in detail, but I think most readers will understand the challenges of covering such a broad topic on a blog such as this. There is much I could have said and didn’t. There is much more I might have said and probably should have. I have merely tried to offer a sketch of the possibilities. The rest – the imaginary part – is up to you.

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Beowulf
• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
• Virgil’s The Aeneid
• Dante’s Inferno
• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
• Milton’s Paradise Lost

After Milton, most people outside of academia couldn’t name many epics. The Eastern epic aside, epic tradition has mostly followed one strain from Homer through the Romantics. It isn’t until we get into the 20th century, with Imagism and Realism taking poetry into new directions, with Ezra Pound whacking us all on the head with his Cantos, Louis Zukovsky giving birth to Ron Silliman through “A”, and William Carlos Williams outdoing them both with Paterson. There have been other epics since, but these are the most significant in terms of the birth of 20th century poetics. And you can add Eliot’s The Waste Land, a short epic by comparison, in there as well.

In each period throughout the literate age there is a dominant recognizable structure among the works that have been canonized. Dante’s terza rima, Milton’s blank verse, and Lord Byron’s ottava rima are examples. These forms represent the popular forms of the time. Even when the poets were innovative they were innovative within certain popularly understood constraints. For instance, it was largely understood that poetry should rhyme and Western poets wouldn’t have thought to write an epic without the use of some kind of rhyme scheme – until Milton.

Another element to the epic is that the storyline typically involves some cultural significance. The hero must be someone with whom the audience can relate. Whether Gilgamesh or Charles Olson’s Maximus, who was possibly a piece of Olson himself, the hero is a cultural icon. The epic is a national story.

The perfect example of a cultural epic is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. Published in 1855, the poem captured the imaginations of its audience much the same way that films like Independence Day do today. In almost every case, the epic poem is written idiomatically for the current culture.

20th Century Epics: A Pound Of Cure

Ezra Pound changed the course of poetry, probably forever. One of the most important ways in which he did is to toss out the traditional rhyme scheme and to invent new rhythms. Ezra Pound loathed the rhymes of the past and he set out to turn poetic structure on its ear, which he did, with the help of his friends Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. Of the four, Williams and Eliot are the best. Pound’s ideas were not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but his disciples have taken them and turned them into rain water for buckets of mud.

Pound’s Cantos, six decades in the making and still unfinished, represent the Modernist aesthetic very well. He was much more concerned with precise language, as he should have been, than he was in, as he called it, the “sequence of a metronome.” (That could have been a direct ridicule of Longfellow.)

Iambic pentameter was out, irregular patterns were in. So began the disintegration of poetics (not that I’m defending iambic pentameter). Ironically, Pound’s ego had this to say about his legacy:

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

He was almost right. He did survive (and will). But did the art of letters come to an end? Well, sort of. The end as it was known at the dawn of the Modern era has certainly come to an end. Poetic forms have been altered permanently, for better or worse.

Pound’s Legacy: The Late 20th Century

While the 20th century has seen its windows of traditional poetic structures, the bulk of it has simply been lesser poets trying to reach Pound’s pinnacle of expression. But instead of heeding his instruction …

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

… many 20th century writers have drifted off into garrulity or gratuitous obscuration. It’s unclear when you read much of it whether or not these are intentional or just a result of a lack of discipline. In general, I’d say it’s a lot of both, but the degree of either depends on the individual poet and the school or movement he or she represents.

A large portion of writing in the 20th century has been a denial of Pound’s insistence that writers should study criticism. Most don’t, and it shows in their work. Pound’s words again:

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

This is a rather cutting statement because the 20th century has seen the proliferation of more schools of thought in poetics than any other century. While the splintering has needled down to the smallest denominations, fewer people in the general public are reading poetry. The reasons for this are disputed and debated, but the truth of it widely recognized.

Rhyme and meter, with some exceptions, were not all that important in 20th century poetics. The forms and structures changed all around. The epic hero was not a solitary figure any more as in the case of Gilgamesh and Hercules. The line units have changed, the rhythms have changed, the nature of the characters have changed, and virtually every aspect of the story itself has transformed into a different mode. That’s significant, but it isn’t necessarily bad (though, I’ll argue, it isn’t all good either).

Rather than send a hero on some epic quest for gold and glory, modern epics have a grander dream. Pound sought to tell the universal story. Charles Olson, in The Maximus Poems, sought to revise U.S. history. Williams, too, sought to retell American history through Paterson, but in a less overtly ideological way. These epics of place have positioned themselves against the previous strain of the heroic epic and the potential to explore that strain of epic storytelling has yet to be tapped fully.

Another kind of epic that has emerged in recent years and which The Maximus Poems might be considered a part is the personal epic. Olson used his narrator Maximus to convey a sense of himself in many ways, but a better example of this type of epic is John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.” This long narrative deals with Ashbery’s reflections on a painting by that name so it is partially a personal narrative, but it is also an ekphrastic poem. You could call it a personal-reflective ekphrastic epic and not go wrong.

These long narratives in the late 20th century, when fast food and flash fiction are the norm, may seem out of place. In a way they are. But they are not dead. There are still epics being written as late as the 1990s and early 21st century. New Formalist poet Frederick Turner published his epic poem Genesis in 1988. As late as 1996, Gary Snyder introduced Mountains and Rivers Without End. Earlier this year, journalist Thomas Flynn published his 76-page epic poem Bikeman, which tells of his experience during the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 while riding his bike in Manhattan. So the epic is still alive and well.

Splinters In The Wood: Poetry’s Multiplying Strains

The popular poetic expressions today – Spoken Word, confessional poetry, creative nonfiction, barely read memoirs, a dying postmodernism still gagging on its last breath – all have their roots buried somewhere in the poetry of the past. Whether they owe their allegiance to Pound or Williams, the pre-literates, Walt Whitman, Medieval Renaissance literature, or Homer, there is someone you can point to in the past who was an influence. That’s as it should be. It means there is no broken strain. Poetic expression does not exist in a vacuum.

Today, though, there is no dominant school of poetic thought. There are competing schools of thought, and sometimes schools within schools that compete. With Pound, the one strain of poetic tradition that has existed for most of literary history split in two. The avant-garde went one way and the traditional, or formal, went the other way. You can trace the avant-garde strain from Pound through Williams, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and on up to the Language School. Now there are new avant-garde movements developing with Flarf and hypertext poetry. Visual poetry has exploded online.

The formal strain has run its course primarily through the academy and the National Endowment of the Arts. It has seen a resurgence in its historic roots with the New Formalists, but much of the 20th century formal element prior to this latter day revival was cross-pollinated from the avant-garde strain, especially from the Black Mountain poets onward. Postmodernism itself saw a sort of fusion between the two strains even while other strains developed from the two – a sort of convergence-divergence matrimony. And this is where we stand today at the dawn of the post-literate age.

Poetics has splintered into competing groups, sometimes quite hostile to each other. The original splintering took place with the Modernists. From there you can see a hard break from the past. The Victorians were the last group of poets to be explicitly formal in their structures until New Formalism saw its birth late last century. By then, the great schism was complete. The fissures are permanent and there is no turning back.

Coming next: The future of the epic.

If you missed the first post in this centuries, click here to catch “The Epic Future: 21st Century Narratives And Poetic History”.

For the purpose of this discussion I’m breaking poetic history down into three periods: The pre-literate, the literate, and the post-literate. The pre-literate period refers to the time in prehistory when poetry was an oral art form and not written. The literate age consists of the bulk of history when writing and reading has allowed for the production and enjoyment of literature as a written art form. The post-literate age is now in its infancy and represents a decline in reading for pleasure and therefore a decline in producing written works (yet to come).

I believe it is necessary to discuss the epic past before getting into the epic future so I will digress to a lengthy discussion on poetic history, in particular, the epic. Most of this first post will be nothing new to most of my more savvy and learned readers. If you don’t want a brush-up, feel free to skip it and wait for the next installment.

Ancient Epics And Setting The Rules
In the pre-literate age, the epic was the preferred poetic form. Because there was no writing, entertainment came by way of those who were willing to perform for others. They sang, danced, chanted, told stories, and re-told the popular and familiar. This was their craft.

When men started writing and creating a written language they naturally took the popular songs and chants and put them on the page for people to read. At first, few people could read. But over time more and more people learned to read and eventually reading became a popular form of entertainment.

It’s interesting, though, that when we examine the ancient epics they all have a few things in common:

• There is a larger-than-life hero
• Action begins in media res – in the middle
• The hero must overcome insurmountable odds to eventuate a victorious outcome
• The hero is rewarded for his courage, strength, and/or heroic deeds (the rewards can be material or immaterial, but often come from the gods)
• Usually, the hero is a warrior, but at times we also see an adventurer-hero
• There is usually some element of romance or a hint of sexual relations between the hero and a maiden or beloved, and often even with a god or two
• The gods often get involved in the affairs of men (and that’s not a sexual reference)

Because performers recited the poems before audiences they needed to remember the lines and most epics were huge. Homer’s epics were quite long so trying to remember every line became a chore. That was the purpose for the rhyme. It was as much a tool for memorization as anything else. Nevertheless, the definition of an epic came to be a story or narrative that told of a hero overcoming grand obstacles to reach a worthy goal. Usually the hero was one person but there have been instances when the hero was a lovable beast or a group of people, a nation even.

The movement from pre-literate storytelling to literate storytelling was a bit subtle in terms of forms. They didn’t change much. The forms and methods used by oral storytellers were the same forms and methods used by those who wrote them down. Initially, written works offered nothing new. They were simply a written re-telling of the stories that had been passed down orally for centuries.

In the next installment of this series I’ll discuss the literate age in depth, though not as in depth as possible (that would take a book). I will cover some highlights and mostly discuss the 20th century. See you then.