Epic Poetry: Tips for Readers and Teachers
Divine
Comedy
The latest book I read in the classic
list I’ve been going through (Link: why I read classics), was Dante’s Divine Comedy. Until I read parts of it
in the Epic Literature course I took this past spring (Link spring cleaning?),
I wasn’t aware that The Inferno,
Pugatorio, and Paradiso were 3
sections of the same book. I had incorrectly assumed that they were all three
different books written by Dante. However, they are all part of the same
incredibly long book. While I read selections from it in the Epic Literature
course, I only just finished reading the
Divine Comedy cover to cover.
As with many epicists, Dante relied
heavily on the classical epicists that came before him, such as Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil with his Aeneid.
In fact, the other main character, besides Dante the character of course, is
Virgil for the entire Inferno and at
least half of the Purgatorio. Dante also incorporated a technique often
used by satirists, where they take real people and put them into their stories
in order to comment on the happenings of the time period. It can make the books
really funny if you get the jokes. Otherwise if you’re high school me and
reading Gulliver’s Travels by
Jonathan Swift and you aren’t familiar with 18th century current
events, then the humor will fly right over your head.
18th Cent. Current Events
For example, as Dante passes the gates of
hell where the people who care neither for good nor evil go, he sees someone
who is supposedly Pope Celestine V.
Originally, He had run from the job forcing cardinals and the king of
Naples to hunt him down in order to crown him pope (1). Once he was pope, given
his inexperience, he wasn’t effectual and quickly granted himself the right to
resign and did so a little more than 5 months after becoming pope (1). But none
of this is explained in the book itself, since Dante’s readers would have known
this background information and chuckled at the reference. Without properly
preparation, students or general readers can be left out of the loop on some
great moments in books. Even if you don’t find Dante’s 13th century
humor hilarious, it definitely can help when someone explains that he
attempting to be funny or at least make a point.
The Iliad
As I mentioned, The Iliad (Link will it join my home library) by Homer was one of
the predecessors that Dante’s paradise lost relies on for genre conventions. I
first read The Iliad in my Film and
Literature course and then selections of it in the same Epic Literature course
that I read Dante. However, at the time it was a bit difficult to tell whether The Iliad was written in prose or
poetry. Part of this naturally comes from the fact that any Iliad I’m reading is a translation, as I
unfortunately do not speak nor do I read Greek. Some of my classmates read it
in the original Greek in some of their classes.
However, I do not have that ability so I
must make do with translations. I’ve read the Fagles translation as well as
portions of the translation in the Norton
Anthology of Western Literature. Fagles’ translation is largely regarded as
the perfect translation. Recently, while doing some research for this post, I
found The New York Times’ original article on Fagles’ translation (2).
Apparently, before Fagles, Alexander Pope was considered the perfect
translation. One of the interesting facts about translating Homer is that the
translators can pick different meters. As it says in the Times article, “Richmond
Lattimore in 1951 chose a long, free six-beat line; Robert Fitzgerald in 1974
went for a tighter iambic blank verse.” But what was the actual meter of
Homer’s poem? Apparently it was Dactylic Hexameter (3). For those who don’t
know, it means six groups (hexa-meter) of one long and then two short
syllables, a total of 18 syllables.
But what does this mean for readers? Well
just as if reading a graphic novel, you would want to observe how a graphic
novel is different from a typical novel, when reading epic poetry it is
important to note that it’s poetry, and typically spoken poetry told over
several days at that. When I took a course on Classical and Ancient Mediteranean
studies freshman year, our professor told us that in Homer there are often
phrases that get repeated again and again, even when they don’t make sense.
Genre Considerations
For instance one character is called the
righteous Aegisthus (OR SOMETHING) even
after he slept with his brother’s wife and then conspired to murder his
brother. My professor explained that scholars discovered that each character
had a given epithet and so any time you said the character’s name in the poem
you would say the epithet. Each epithet was already in the correct meter so all
you had to do was remember plot points and the character’s epithets and then as
you recited the poem it basically wrote itself. This is something students need
to know: today we are always looking for the most authentic original version of
something. However, that is impossible with stories like Homer’s, because every
time the poem was recited it changed a little bit each occasion.
Paradise
Lost
Finally the first epic poem that I read
was Paradise Lost by John Milton.
Since then, I’ve read parts of it two more times. This I think is a crucial
thing to remember when reading and/or teaching epic poems. You don’t need to
read all of them. Especially when first reading epic poetry, it can be
overwhelming, particularly for high school students, the age group I want to
eventually teach. People can still read the full book on their own if they so
wish, but even then it is good to break it apart into chunks so that it’s more
manageable.
Chunks
Thankfully, writers of epic poetry often
separate their poems into chunks for you. Dante’s Divine Comedy has Cantos, and Homer’s Iliad and Milton’s Paradise Lost have books. It is completely
possible to assign students parts of the epic poem and leave out certain sections
and just give summaries. For those reading it the whole way through on their
own reading through a book or canto and then reading a summary from websites
like sparknotes or shmoop is a good idea. Then you can make sure you understood
what is going on, before continuing on to the next section. Teachers could have
students write their own spark notes or shmoop summary as an in-class or
homework assignment, depending on what your homework policy is (link HW).
In The End
While epic poetry can seem daunting
to even the most experienced readers, they aren’t considered classics for
nothing. The sense of accomplishment of decoding what even a short passage
means can boost the confidence of readers and sharpen their critical thinking
skills. Additionally, epic poetry can be a nice change of pace and opens the
door for genre comparisons: How do authors accomplish x in a novel vs epic
poetry? How is imagery used in epic poetry vs a graphic novel? Etc. Finally,
there’s a reason these books keep showing up whether in high school, or college
classes or classics lists. They’re beautifully written. What has been your
experience reading and/or teaching epic poetry? What were some unexpected
challenges or breakthroughs that you experienced? Let me know in the comments!
Notes:
Sources:
Image
Credit:
Divine
comedy: Wikisource Painting turned into Book Cover on Feedbooks.com
Paradise
lost: Penguin Popular Classics' Cover on Amazon.com
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