![]() ![]() Though epic poetry may no longer be as popular as it once was, most of us remain familiar with the small pantheon of great poets whose labours covered the breadth of human experience. Alongside the peerless Iliad, myth-as-History in Virgil’s Aeneid and the Norse Eddas distill the elements of a tribe, society, or empire more purely than any prosaic treatment could. ![]() Ĭan any parent’s eyes not fill with tears when Homer describes Hector leaving his infant son Astyanax and wife Andromache to meet his fate in battle, indelibly painting the sacrifices of the Home Front? Has anyone brought more vividly to life the horrors of combat than those burning lines that blot the pages of The Iliad like the gouts of blood he describes so often:Īthena drove the shaft and it split the archer’s nose between the eyes – it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw and the point came ripping out beneath his chin… and his life and power slipped away on the wind. Homer remains the supreme chronicler of history in verse. Yet whether inside the ivory tower or out, one senses that we have lost touch with the deeper power of History. Outside the academy and the newsroom, popular history continues to attract a large audience, especially biography and battle, though more than occasionally catering to the lowest common denominator. Politics now suffuses History, disproving the claims of scientific objectivity that the discipline has long used to justify its authority. The academic focus on class, race, and gender since the 1960s has divorced most professional historians from the general public lately, that worldview has seeped into journalism-as-history, promoting a wholesale – and many would say unsupportable – reinterpretation of the very founding of America. History has long been a battlefield in the culture wars (and here we must distinguish between ‘history’ as the past and ‘History’ as a discipline). Could its return somehow bridge the divide between academics and laymen or between those who no longer seem even to agree on the basic facts of the past? Perhaps it could even re-instill a sense of awe, humility, and gratitude that might dampen the flames of civil discord. No art form – and History is ultimately an art – can portray the pathos and grandeur of history quite like epic poetry. ![]() ![]() Surely not all could be captured in poetry, but what was might well strike nearer the truth of the matter than any traditional history, no matter how detailed. Though more complex to relate, one could envision an epic poem bringing to life the enormity of the Great Depression or the 2008 financial crisis, with its Wall Street avarice and Main Street trauma. Less graphic but no less powerful than war are other travails that individuals and societies experience. One might think then that Vietnam, let alone the American Civil War, would have been the perfect grist for the mill of a poet-historian. It uniquely captures the intensity of emotions brought forth by tragedy, especially war. Why do we no longer turn to epic poetry to portray the majesty and tragedy of history? Since Homer, epic poetry has occupied a special, if rare place in the Western canon. ![]()
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