CITa TIT UTa DI

term to critics
bathos and anticlimax{Bathos is Greek for "depth," and it has been an indispensable
Since Alexander Pope, parodying the Greek Longinus' famous essay On the
Sublime (that is,
in 1727 an essay On Bathos: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry. With mock
loftiness ), wrote

solemnity Pope assures his readers that he undertakes "to lead them as it were by the hand... the

gentle down-hill way to Bathos; the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra, of true
30 A Handbook of Literary Termns
descent in literature when
Modern Poesy!" The word eversince has been used for an unintentional
overshoots the mark and drops into the
straining to be pathetic or passionate or elevated, the writer
two absent lovers
trivial or the ridiculous. Among his examples Pope cites "the modest request of
in a contemporary poemn

Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time,

And make two lovers happy.
intended climay
The slogan "For God, for Country, and for Yale!" is bathetic because it moves to
descent in
that is, an ascending sequence of importance) in its rhetorical order, but to unintended
its reference-at least for someone who is not a Yale graduate. Even major poets sometimes fal
unwittingly into the same rhetorical figure. In the early version of The Prelude (1805; Book IX
william Wordsworth, after recounting at length the tale of the star-crossed lovers Vaudracour and
Julia, tells how Julia died, leaving Vaudracour to raise their infant son:
It consoled him here
To attend upon the Orphan and perform
The office of a Nurse to his young Child
Which after a short time by some mistake b
Or indiscretion of the Father, died.
blank versef Blank consists of lines of iambic pentameter
verse
(five-stress iambic verse) which are
unrhymed-hence the term "blank." Of all English metrical forms it
is closest to the natural
rhythms of English speech, yet flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has
been more frequently and variously
used than any other form of versification. Soon after blank
verse was in1uroduced by the Earl of Surrey in his translations of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil' s The
Aeneid (about 1540), it became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later
poetic drama, a free
form of blank verse remained the medium in such twentieth-century verse
plays as those by
 1 Handbook of Literary Terms
Maxwell Anderson and T. S. Eliot. John Milton used blank verse for his epic Paradise Ia.
(1667). James Thomson for his deseriptive and philosophical Seasons (1726-30), Wilia
Wordsworth for his autobiographical Prelude (1805), Alfred, Lord Tennyson for the narrati
ldylls of the King (1891), Robert Browning for The Ring and the Book (1868-69) and man
dramatic monologues, and T. S. Eliot for much of The Waste Land (1922). A large number
meditative lyrics, from the Romantic Period to the present, have also been written in blank verse
including Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Tennyson's "Tears
Idle Tears" (in whiçh the blank verse is divided into five-line stanzas), and Wallace Stevens
Sunday Morning.") 1ead ta et off a sustained nassage a r e caled versenam
 ViCtorian poetry and prose, as well as of academic scholariywrB in a sustained way,|
mock epic or mock-heroic poem is that tvne of narody which imitates,
A but applies t to laac
of the epic genre,
DD c e l a b o r a t e form and the ceremonious stvle of this type, The Rape o The LocCk
COmmonplace or trivial subject matter. In a masterpiece
perspective a quarrel
between
ne
(I/14), Alexander Pope views through the grandiose epic includes such eIencius O
the theft of lady's curl. The story
belles and elegants of his day over a
a visit to the
voyage on board ship,
t r a d i t i o n a l epic protocol as supernatural machinery,
a
with metaphors, hatpins,
scaled battle between the sexes-although
underworld, and a heroically other dignified petic forms
The term mock-heroic is often applied to
and snuff for weapons. comic "Ode
mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas Gray's
which are purposely
Favorite Cat" (1748); see under bathos and anticlimax.
on the Death of a
farpe diemi Carpe Diem, meaning "seize the day," is a Latin phrase from one of Horace 's Odes
. xI) which has become the name for a very common literary motif, especially in lyric poetry. The
in
speaker a carpe dienm poem emphasizes that life is short and time is fleeting in order to urge his
is often
auditor-who
of present pleasures. A
represented as a virgin reluctant to
change her condition-to make the most
frequent emblem of the brevity of physical beauty and the finality of death
is the rose, as in Edmund
Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 1590-96 (II. xii. 74-75; "Gather therefore
the Rose, whilst yet is prime" ), and, in the
seventeenth century, Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins,
to Make Much of Time"
("Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may" ), and Edmund Waller's "Go,
Lovely Rose." The more complex poems of this type communicate the
poignant sadness-or else
desperation-of the pursuit of pleasures under the sentence of inevitable death; for example,
Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"
in The Rubáiyát of
1681) and the set of variations on the carpe diem motif
Omar Khayyám, translated by the Victorian poet Edward FitzGerald. In
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrotelThe Lover: A Ballad," a 1747
brilliant counter to the carpe diem
poems written by male poets; in it, the
utterly resistible. woman explains to her importunate suitor
why she finds him
CUNA1

complication (in a plot): 229.

to be the term for figures of speech
meaning a conceptor image, "conceit" c a m e
conceit: Originally elaborate, between two very dissimilar
ingeniously
which establish a striking parallel, usually seventeenth
language.) English poets of the sixteenth and
things or situations. (See figurative of conceit are often distinguishedà
centuriesadapted the term from the Italian "concetto." Two types
by specific names:

1. The Petrarchan conceit is a type of figure used in

love poems that had been novel and effective
in the Italian poetry of Petrarch, but became hackneyed in some of
his imitators among the
54 AHandbook ofLiterary Teris

Elizabethan sonneteers. (See the entry sonnet.) The figure consists of detailed, ingenious, and
often exaggerated COmparisons applied to the disdainful mistress, as cold and cruel as She is

beautiful., and to the distresses and despair of her worshipful lover. (See courtly love.) Sir
Thomas Wyat 150342). for example, in the sonnet "My Galley Chargèd with Forgetfulness
that he translated from Petrarch, compares the lover's state in detail to a ship laboring in a
storm.Another sonnet of Petrarch's
translated by Wvatt begins with an oxvmoron descriding the
opposing passions experienced by a courtly sufferer from the disease of love:
I find no
peace: and all my war is done;
I fear and hope: I burn and
freeze in ice.
Shakespeare (who at times employed this type of conceit himself) parodied some standard
comparisons by Petrarchan sonneteers in his Sonnet 130,
beginning
My mistress'eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far red than her lips'red:
more
If snow be white. why then her breasts are
If hairs be wires, black wires
dun:
grow on her head.
2. The metaphysiçal conceit is a characteristic fi
 ouy (T800).

An important subtype of the elegy is the pastoral elegy, which represents both the poet and the
ondhe mourns-who is usually also a poet-as shepherds (the Latin word for shepherd is "pastor
This poetic form was originated by the Sicilian Greek poet Theocritus, was continued by the
Roman Virgil, was developed in various European countries during the Renaissance, and remainei
current in English poetry through the nineteenth century. Notable English pastoral elegies ate
Spenser's "Astrophel," on the death of Sir Philip Sidney (1595) ; Milton's "Lycidas" (1638)
Shelley's "Adonais" (1$21) ; and in the Victorian age, Arnold's "Thyrsis." The pastoral elegiss
from the Greeks through the Renaissance, developed a set of elaborate conventions, which
a
illustrated here by reference to "Lycidas." In addition to the fictional representation of both moun
and subject as shepherds tending their flocks (lines 23-36 and elsewhere), we often find te
following conventional features:
1. The lyric speaker begins by invoking the muses, and
goes on to make frequent reference to
other figures from classical mythology (lines 15-22, and
later).
2. All nature joins in mourning the shepherd's death (lines
37-49). (Recent critics who stress the
mythic and ritual origins poetic genres claim that this feature is a survival from
of
primitive
laments for the death of Thammuz, Adonis, or other
vegetational deities who died in the autumn
to be reborn in the spring. See myth critics.)
3. The mourner charges with negligence the nymphs or other
guardians of the dead shepherd (lines
50-63).
4. There is a procession of appropriate mourners (lines 88-111).
5. The poet raises questions about the justice of fate, or else of Providence, and adverts to the
corrupt conditions of his own times (lines 64-84, 113-31). Such passages, though sometims
called "digressions," are integral to the evolution of the mourner's in
thought
"Lycidas."
6 Post-Renaissance elegies often include an elaborate passage in which appropriate flowers ae
brought to deck the hearse (lines 133-51).
7. There is a closing consolation. In Christian elegies,
the lyric reversal from grief and despair
joy and assurance typically occurs when the elegist comes to realize that death in his world
the entry to a higher life (lines 165-85).
 Literary Terms 87

In his Life of Milton (1779) Samuel Johnson, who disapproved both of pastoralism and mnythol-
Ogy in modern poetry, decried "Lycidas" for its inherent improbability," but in the elegies by
Milton and other major poets the ancient rituals provide a structural frame on which they play
variations with originality and power. Some of the pastoral conventions, although adapted to an
industrial age and a non-Christian worldview, survive still in Walt Whitman's elegy on Lincoln,
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1866).
In the last two decades of the twentieth century there was a strong revival of the
espe- elegy,
cially in America, to mourn the devastation and death wrought by AIDS among talented young
intellectuals, poets, and artists; see Michael Klein, ed., Poets for Life: Seventy-six Poets Respond to
AIDS (1989).
See conventions and pastoral. On the elegy, refer to T. P. Harrison, Jr., and H. J. Leon, eds.,
The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology (1939); Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Sudies in the Genre
from Spenser to Yeats (1985). On "Lyeidas": C. A. Patrides, ed. Milton's "Lycidas": The Tradi
tion and the Poem (rev. 1983), which includes a number of recent critical
essays; and Scott
Elledge, ed., Milton's "Lycidas" (1966), which reprints classical and Renaissance pastoral elegies
and other texts as background to Milton's poem. For both traditional and modern forms of
see the
elegy,
introductory materials and the poems reprinted in Sandra M. Gilbert, ed., Inventions of
Farewell: A Book of Elegies (2001).
eroic couplet:Lines of iambic pentameter (see meter) which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on.
The adjective heroC was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of
Such couplets in heroic (that is, epic) poems and in heroic dramas. This verse form was introduced
into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer (in The Legend of Good Women and most of The
Canterbury Tales), and has been in constant use ever since. From the age of John Dryden through
that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the predominant measure for all the
English poetic
kinds; some poets, including Alexander Pope. used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.
(In that era, usually called the Neoclassic Period, the poets wrote closed couplets, in which the
end of each pair of lines tends to coincide with the end either of a sentence or of a self-sufficient
unit of syntax. The sustained employment of the closed heroic couplet meant that two lines had to
serve something of the function of a stanza. In order to maximize the interrelationships of the
component parts of the couplet, neoclassie poets often used an end-stopped first line (that is, made
the end of the line coincide with a pause in the syntax), and also broke many single lines into
subunits by balancing the line around a strong caesura, or medial pause in the syntax.
The following passage from John Denham's Cooper's Hill (which he added in the version of
1655) is an early instance of the artful management of the closed couplet that fascinated later
neoclassic poets; they quoted it and commented upon it again and again, and used it as a model for
exploiting the potentialities of this verse form. (See the comment on Cooper's Hill under topo-
graphical poetry.) Note how Denham achieves diversity within the straitness of his couplets by
shifts in the position of the caesuras, by the use of rhetorical balance and antithesis between the
of the
single lines and between the two halves within a single line, and by the variable positioning
the
adjectives in the second couplet. Note also the framing"and the emphasis gained by inverting
iambic foot that begins the first line and the last line, and by manipulating similar and contrasting
vowels and consonants. The poet is addressing the River Thames:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

not dul;
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.
and
Alexander Pope, the greatest master of the metrical, syntactical,
And here is a passage from lines
heroic coupletX"Of the Characters of Women," 1735,
possibilities of the closed
netorical
243-48):
See how the world its veterans rewards!

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards;

end,
Fair to n0 purpose, artful to no
without a friend;
YOung without lovers, old
a sot;
A fop their passion, but their prize

Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!

magery: This term is one of the most common in criticism, and one of the most variable in meanina
Its applications range all the way from the mental pictures" which, it is sometimes claimed, a
e
experienced by the reader of a poem, to the totality of the components which make up a poem
Examples of this range of usage are the statements by the poet C. Day Lewis, in his Poetic Imaoe
(1948, pp. 17-18), that an image "is a picture made out of words," and that "a poem may itself be
an image composed from a multiplicity of images." Three discriminable uses of the word, how.
ever, are especially frequent; in all these senses imagery is said to make poetry concrete, a
opposed to abstract:
1. ("Imagery'" (that is, "images" taken collectively) is used to signify all the objects and qualitiesof
sense perception referred to in a poem or other work of literature, whether by literal description,
by allusion, or in the vehicles (the secondary references) of its similes and metaphors.
William Wordsworth's "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" (1800), the imagery in this
broad sense includes the literal objects the poem refers to (for example, "untrodden ways
"springs," "grave" ), as well as the "violet" of the metaphor and the "star" of the simile in the
second stanza. ) The term "image" should not be taken to imply a visual reproduction of
the

object denote; some readers of the passage experience visual images and some do not; and
those who do, the explicitness and details of the pictures vary greatly. Also, "imagery" In
among
tactile
this usage includes not only visual sense qualities, but also qualities that are auditory,
(touch), thermal (heatand cold), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and kinesthetic (sensations
 LilerarY Terms

of movement). In his In Memoriam (1850), No.

101, for example, Tennyson's imagery encom-
are visible, but also qualities that are smelled, tasted, or heard,
Dasses not only things that
together with a suggestion, in the adjective *"summer," of warmth:
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air....

used, narrowly, to signify only specific descriptions of visible objects and

Imageryis more

Scenes, especially if the description is vivid and particularized, as in this passage from Marianne
Moore's "The Steeple-Jack"

a sea the purple of the peacock's neck is

paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine tree of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
grey.
 to
Silab" ik): 290; 79, 150.
de: In itstraditional application,
"ode" denotes a
treatmenl, eleväted in style, and elaborate in its long lyric poC Norman Maclean said
stanzaic structure. that the
term now Calls to mind a lyric
which is massive, public in its proclamations, and Pindaric in its
classical prorotype (From Action to Image." in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane,
1952). The
prototype was
estahlished by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were modeled on the songs by the
chorus in Greek drama. (His complex stanzas were patterned in sets of three: moving in dance
a
rhythm to the left, the chorus chanted the strophe; moving to the right, the
standing still, the epode. antistrophe; then.
The regular or Pindaric ode in English is a close imitation of Pindar's form, with all the
strophes and antistrophes written in one stanza pattern, and ail the epodes in another. This form
was introduced into England by Ben Jonson's ode
"Tothe Immortal Memory and Friendship
of
That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary
and Sir H. Morison)(1629); the typical construction
can, be
conveniently studied in this poem or in Thomas Gray's "The
Progress of Poesy" (1757).The
irregular ode was introduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who imitated the Pindaric style and
matter but disregarded the recurrent stanzaic pattern in each strophic triad; instead, he allowed
each stanza to establish its own pattern of varying line lengths, number of lines, and rhyme scheme.
This type of iregular stanzaic structure, which is free to alter
in accordance with shifts in subject
and mood, has been the most common for the English ode ever since; Wordsworth's "Ode
Intimations of Immortality" (1807) is representative.
Pindar's odes were encomiastic; that is, they were written to praise and glorify someone-in
the instance of Pindar, the ode celebrated
a victoriousathlete inthe Olympic games. (See epideictic.
under rhetoric.) The earlier English odes, and many later ones, were also written to eulogize v
30mething, such as a person (John Dryden's *Anne Killigrew"), or the arts of music or poetry
ryden's Alexander's Feast"), or a time of day (Collins "Ode to Evening"), or abstract concepts
uray's "Hymn to Adversity'" and Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"). Romantic poets perfected the
P SOnal ode of description and passionate meditation, which is stimulated by (and sometimes at its
USE reverts
to) an aspect of the outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a personal
Oonal problem or a generally human one (Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode, Coleridge's
"T
ection: An Ode," Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"). Recent examples of this latter type are
refrain: A line, or part of a line, or a group of lines, which is repeated in the course of a poem.
Sometimes with slight changes, and usually at the end of each stanza. The refrain occurs in many
element in Elizabethan songs, where it may be merely a
ballads and work poems, and is a frequent
"It Was a Lover and His Lass" :With a
nonverbal carrier of the melodic line, as in Shakespeare's
a hey nonino." A famous
refrain is that which closes each stanza in Edmund
hey, and a ho, and
woods shall to me answer, and my echo ring"-in which
Spenser's "Epithalamion" (1594)-"The
sequential çhanges indicate the altering sounds during the successive hours of the poet's wedding /
-iS
"Sweet Thames, run softly,tillTend my song
day. The refrain in Spenser's "Prothalamion
Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), where it is applied to the
S.
echoed ironically in Part III of T.
of polluted rivers.
Thames in the modern age asin Poe's "The Raven" (1845)-
word-"Nevermore,"
of a single
refrain may
A consist only all the auditors join in singing.
stanza refrain occurs
in a song, which Burms
entirestanza.If the by Robert
or of an
Syne" and many other songs
in "Auld Lang
it is called the chorus; for, example,
in the late eighteenth century.
 in
satire:/Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making
Tidi ulOus and toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. differs
evoking
It

from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that
as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work
itself. That butt may
IS, it uses laughter
be anindividual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even
much of Jonathan Swift's
(as in the Earl of Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and
 Literary Terms 273

Culliver's Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire

human race. The distinction between ne
eamic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its extremes. Shakespeare's Falstaff iS mainy
com
a
comic ereation. presented primarily for our enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night is tor the most part comic but has aspects of satire directed against the type of the
fatuous and hypocritical Puritan:Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of person
whose cleverness or stupidity-is put at the service of his cupidity, and John Dryden's
MacFlecknoe (1682). while representing a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster, satirized
specifically the living author Thomas Shadwel
Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human vice and folly;
Alexander Pope, for example, remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of
being ridiculous." Its frequent claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the
failing rather than the individual, and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for
which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic "Verses on the
Death of Dr. Swift" (1739):
Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice, but spared the name..
His satire points at no defect,
But what all mortals may correct..
He spared a hump. or crooked nose.

Whose owners set not up for beaux.

syllabic meter: 170.

symbol: In the broadest sense a symbol is anything which signifies something else; in this sense all
words are symbols. In discussing literature, however, the term "symbol" is applied only to a word
or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or suggests a range
of reference, beyond itself. Some symbols are "conventional" or "public": thus "the Cross," "the
Red, White, and Blue," and "the Good Shepherd" are terms that refer to symbolic objects of which
the further significance is determinate within a particular culture. Poets, like all of us, use such
conventional symbols; many poets, however, also use "private" or "personal symbols.Often they
do so by exploiting widely shared associations between an object or event or action and a particu-
lar concept; for example, the general association of a peacock with pride and of an eagle with
heroic endeávor, or the rising sun with birth and the setting sun with death, or climbing with effort
 Literary Terms 305

arprogress and descent with surrender or failure Some poets, however,

repeatedly use symbols
whose significance they largely generate themselves, and these pose a more difficult
problem in
interpretation. )
Take as an example the word "rose," which in its literal use signifies a species of flower. In
Robert Burns'line "O my love's like a red, red rose," the word "rose" is used as a simile; and in the
ines by Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39),
She was our queen, our rose, our star;
And then she danced-0 Heaven, her
dancing!
the word "rose" is used as a metaphor. In The
Romance of the Rose, a long medieval dream vision
we read about a
half-opened rose to which the dreamer's access is aided by a character called "Fa=
Welcome," but impeded or forbidden by other characters called "Reason," "Shame," and "Jea
ousy." We readily recognize that the whole narrative is a sustained allegory about an elabora
courtship, in which most of the agents are personified abstractions(and
the rose itself functions
an allegorical emblem (that is, an object whose significance is made determinate by its qualit
and by the role it plays in the narrative) which
represents both the lady's love and her lovely boe
Then we read William Blake's poem "The Sick Rose."

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
 ICISIN. Ol.

envoy (in a poem) 292.

epic: In its strict sense the term epic or heroic
poem is applied to a work that meets at least
following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious the
style, and centered on a heroic or quasidivine subject, told in a formal and
elevated
figure
nation, or (in the instance of John Milton's Paradise
on whose actions
depends the fate of a
tribe, a
There is a standard distinction between Lost) the human race.
called folk epics" or "primary traditional and literary epics. "Traditional epics" (also
epics") were written versions of what had
poems about a tribal or national hero during a warlike originally been oral
Iliad and Odyssey that the Greeks ascribed to age. (See oral poetry.) Among these are the
Homer; the Anglo-Saxon
Spanish Poema del Cid in the twelfth century;Beowulf;
Chanson de Roland and the the French
and the thirteenth
century German epic Nibelungenlied. "Literary
men in deliberate imitation of
epics" were
composed by individual poetic crafts
the traditional form. Of this kind
is Virgil's Latin
which later served as the chief model for poem the Aeneid
Lost in turn became, in the Romantic Milton's literary epic Paradise Lost (1667). Paradise
Period, a model for John Keats'
as well as for William Blake's several fragmentary epic Hyperion
epics, or "prophetic books" (The Four
Jerusalem), which translated into Blake's own mythic terms the Zoas, Milton
Milton's subject. biblical narrative that had been
In hisAnatomy of Criticism (1957) Northrop Frye asserts that
sors
"demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than Homer established for his succes
the
of a friend or
not comic," and that with
this "*objective and disinterested leader, is tragic and
based "on the vision of nature element," the epic
only to
as an
impersonal order." The epic was ranked byacquired
tragedy, and by many Renaissance critics as the
an
authority
Aristotle as second
certainly the most ambitious of poetic highest of all genres. The literary epic is
edge, invention, and skill to sustain theenterprises, making immense demands on a
poet's know.
encompass the world of its scope, grandeur, and authority of a poem that tends to
day and a large portion of its
many languages over nearly three thousand learning. Despite numerous attempts
poems of indubitable years,
we
possess no more
than a half-dozen sSuch
share the greatness. Literary epics are highly conventional
following features, derived by way of the compositions which usually
.
Aeneid from the traditional
The hero is a
figure of great national or even cosmic epics of Homer:
warrior Achilles, who is the importance. In the lliad he is the Grecs
son of the sea
goddess Aphrodite. In Paradise nymph Thetis; and Virgil's Aeneas is the son oI
race, or if we Lost, Adam and Eve are the
regard Christ as the
protagonist,
He
progenitors of the entire hu
is both God and
man. Blake's primal figure
 .iterary 1erms 91

4the Universal Man' Albion, who incorporates, before his fall, humanity and God and the
cosmos as well.

setting of the poem is ample in scale, and may be worldwide, or even larger. Odysseus
The
wanders over the (the whole of the world known at the time), and in Book
Mediterranean basin

into the underworld (as does Virgil's Aeneas). The scope of Paradise
Lost is the
XI he descends between.
it takes place in heaven, on earth, n hell, and in the cosmic space
entire universe, for
(See Ptolemaic universe.)
deeds in battle, such as Achilles' feats in the Trojan War, or a
3. The action involves extraordinary
long, arduous, and dangerous journey intrepidly
accomplished, such as the wanderings of Odysseus
the gods. Paradise Lost
on his way
back to his homeland, in the face of opposition by some of
rebel angels against God, the journey of Satan through
includes the revolt in heaven by the
his desperately audacious attempt to outwit God
chaos to discover the newly created world, and the sacrificial action of
by corruptingmankind, in which his success is ultimately frustrated by
Christ. interest or an active part
take an
4. In these great actions the gods and other supernatural beings
in Homer, and Jehovah, Christ, and the angels in Paradise Lost. These
the Olympian gods
the machinery, in the sense that they
supernaturalagents were in the Neoclassic Age called
were part of the literary contrivances of the epic.
ceremonial performance, and is narrated in a ceremonial style which is
5. An epic poem is a
of
and formality
deliberately ordinary speech and proportioned to the grandeur
distanced from
elabo-
Hence Milton's grand style--his formal diction and
the heroic subject and architecture.
are in large part modeled on Latin poetry,
his sonorous lists of
rate and stylized syntax, which
names and wide-ranging allusions,
and his imitation of Homer's epic similes and epithets.

or formulas, in the choice and ordering

of epi-
There are also widely used epic conventions,
these features, as exemplified in Paradise Lost:
sodes; prominent among them are
invokes a muse or guiding spirit to
1. The narrator begins by stating his argument, or epic theme,
then addresses to the muse the epic question, the
answer to
inspire him in his great undertaking, I. 1-49).
which inaugurates the narrative proper (Paradise Lost, action.
the middle of things" ), at a critical point in the
2. The narrative starts in medias res ("in
their scattered forces and determin-
Paradise Lost opens with the fallen angels in hell, gathering events in
V-VII does the angel Raphael narrate to Adam the
ing on revenge. Not until Books
Books XI-XII, after the fall, Michael foretells to
heaven which led to this situation; while in
Thus Milton's epic, although its action
Adam future events up to Christ's second coming.
all time from the creation to the end of
focuses on the temptation and fall of man, encompasses
the world. in
introduced in formal detail, as
3. There are catalogues of some of the principal characters, These
fallen angels in Book I of Paradise Lost.
Milton's description of the procession of atti-
reveal their diverse temperaments and moral
characters are often given set speeches that
Pandemonium, Book II.
tudes, an example is the debate in
from
extension, to narratives which differ in many respects
The term "epic" is often applied, by and the profound
this model but manifest the epic spirit and grandeur in the scale, the scope, Divine Comedy
human importance of their subjects. In this
broad sense Dante's fourteenth-century
are often called epics,
and Edmund Spenser's late-sixteenth-century The Faerie Queene (1590-96)
Herman Melville's
as are conspicuously large-scale and wide-ranging
works of prose fiction such as
this
War and Peace (1869), and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922);
Moby-Dick (1851) Leo Tolstoy's
,