Epic poetry
Later writers like Virgil, Apollonius of Rhodes, Dante, Camões, and Milton adopted and adapted Homer's style and subject matter, but used devices available only to those who write.
[7][8][9] Famous examples of epic poetry include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Indian Mahabharata and Rāmāyaṇa in Sanskrit and Silappatikaram and Manimekalai in Tamil, the Persian Shahnameh, the Ancient Greek Odyssey and Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Old English Beowulf, Dante's Divine Comedy, the Finnish Kalevala, the German Nibelungenlied, the French Song of Roland, the Spanish Cantar de mio Cid, the Portuguese Os Lusíadas, the Armenian Daredevils of Sassoun, the Old Russian The Tale of Igor's Campaign, John Milton's Paradise Lost, The Secret History of the Mongols, the Kyrgyz Manas, and the Malian Sundiata.
Epic poems of the modern era include Derek Walcott's Omeros, Mircea Cărtărescu's The Levant and Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz.
Early 20th-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems.
Parry and Lord also contend that the most likely source for written texts of the epics of Homer was dictation from an oral performance.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord have argued that the Homeric epics, the earliest works of Western literature, were fundamentally an oral poetic form.
Nearly all of Western epic (including Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Divine Comedy) self-consciously presents itself as a continuation of the tradition begun by these poems.
Examples: This Virgilian epic convention is referenced in Walt Whitman's poem title / opening line "I sing the body electric".
For example, the Iliad does not tell the entire story of the Trojan War, starting with the judgment of Paris, but instead opens abruptly on the rage of Achilles and its immediate causes.
[23] Indo-European epic poetry, by contrast, usually places strong emphasis on the importance of line consistency and poetic meter.
Dactylic hexameter has been adapted by a few anglophone poets such as Longfellow in "Evangeline", whose first line is as follows: Old English, German and Norse poems were written in alliterative verse,[25] usually without rhyme.
An example is found in the first lines of the Divine Comedy by Dante, who originated the form: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (A) mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (B) ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura (B) esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte (C) che nel pensier rinnova la paura!
Molto egli oprò col senno e con la mano; Molto soffrì nel glorioso acquisto: E invan l'Inferno a lui s'oppose; e invano s'armò d'Asia e di Libia il popol misto: Chè 'l Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto ai santi Segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti.
The sacred armies, and the godly knight, That the great sepulchre of Christ did free, I sing; much wrought his valor and foresight, And in that glorious war much suffered he; In vain 'gainst him did Hell oppose her might, In vain the Turks and Morians armèd be: His soldiers wild, to brawls and mutines prest, Reducèd he to peace, so Heaven him blest.
[36][37] Balto-Finnic (e.g. Estonian, Finnish, Karelian) folk poetry uses a form of trochaic tetrameter that has been called the Kalevala meter.
The folk genre known as al-sira relates the saga of the Hilālī tribe and their migrations across the Middle East and north Africa, see Bridget Connelly (1986).
[43] Some Indian oral epics feature strong women who actively pursue personal freedom in their choice of a romantic partner (Stuart, Claus, Flueckiger and Wadley, eds, 1989, p. 5).
One of the most famous, The Tale of the Heike, deals with historical wars and had a ritual function to placate the souls of the dead (Tokita 2015, p. 7).
