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Tom asked in the Commedia thread about whether there were any unsuccessful epics. This is a bit of an awkward question, not least in terms of how you define a lack of success, but I thought it might be worth having a crack at it and picking the brains of the Barbelith massive.
First up, what is an epic? I think for the purposes of our enquiry we could limit it for most periods to sustained narratives in verse, most likely in a “heroic” metre (although we can offer a degree of variance on this one – for example, works in hexameter but also allow for elegiac couplets, but iambic pentameters in English, trochaic tetrameter in Finnish(?), that kind of thing). I was going to suggest limiting it to the actions of a specific group of people, but I figure that would count out the Works and Days, the Metamorphoses and so on, so maybe not…
Then there’s the question of what constitutes success. For the ancient stuff, there’s always the argument from posterity – what did not survive has not succeeded - but that only seems to cover one side of the argument. What about the critical reception of surviving works, at the time or after it? And, in more modern times, would we expect a lengthy sustained narrative in poetry to be commercially successful? If not, what other criteria would we apply?
So, unsuccessful epics. I guess we could start with the cyclic epics – the Cypria, Little Iliad, Aethiopis, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, Telegony, and any others I’ve missed. Although apparently pretty popular at the time, these have not survived, and we have them only in summary form. They also suffer from a limited surviving critical response – can we work out whether they were well or badly thought of by those in the know? Callimachus’ reaction to Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica is problematised (another candidate there, possibly?), but he does seem to put the boot in on the cyclic poets, at least arguably.
Lots of other epics are left with us only as references, but how about epics that were essentially just crap? Maybe Statius’ Thebaid? And surely for every Faerie Queene or Divine Comedy there must have been an absolute buckload of failures, by their standards or ours. Let alone the 18th and 19th centuries…
And the modern age, where we can at least make some sort of comparisons based on popularity, has given us odd pieces like Simon Armitage’s Killing Time, Tony Harrison’s Prometheus (more of a play, I guess) and Walcott’s Omeros, but the example that pops into my head is probably that history of Britain in verse book that came out fairly recently – would that count as equivalent to something like the Metamorphoses? |
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