The true heroic epic never evolved far from its preliterate origins, and it arose only in the Heroic Age which preceded a settled civilization. The conditions reflected in, say, the Iliad and Odyssey are much the same as those of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the German Nibelungenlied, or the Irish stories of Cú Chulainn. The literary epic is another matter altogether. Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, or John Milton’s Paradise Lost are products of highly sophisticated literary cultures. Many long poems sometimes classified as epic literature are no such thing—Dante’s La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), for example, is a long theological, philosophical, political, moral, and mystical poem. Dante considered it to be a kind of drama which obeyed the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Goethe’s Faust is in dramatic form and is sometimes even staged—but it is really a philosophical poetic novel. Modern critics have described long poems such as T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos as “philosophical epics.” There is nothing epic about them; they are reveries, more or less philosophical.

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