epic

Genre of narrative poem or cycle of poems dealing with some great deed – often the founding of a nation or the forging of national unity – and often using religious or cosmological themes. The two main epic poems in the Western tradition are The Iliad and The Odyssey, attributed to the Ancient Greek Homer, which were probably intended to be chanted in sections at feasts. Sometimes called ‘heroic poetry’, an epic poem may employ the metre (formal structure) termed heroic verse.

Greek and later criticism, which considered the Homeric epic the highest form of poetry, produced the genre of secondary epic – such as the Aeneid (29–19 BC) of the Roman Virgil, Italian poet Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1581), and English poet John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) – which attempted to emulate Homer, often for a patron or for a political cause. The term is also applied to narrative poems of other traditions: the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the Finnish Kalevala; in India the Rāmāyana (c. 300 BC) and Mahābhārata (c. 300 BC); and the Babylonian Gilgamesh (c. 3000 BC). All of these evolved in different societies to suit similar social needs and used similar literary techniques.

Because of the length of epic poems and their concern with important themes, the term ‘epic’ is often applied to works that are written on a large scale and are considered to be of great importance.