What an epic is

A term you'll meet in literary genre.

An epic is a long narrative poem that recounts the heroic deeds and grand adventures of a larger-than-life hero, in an elevated style and on a scale that involves the fate of a people, a nation, or even the cosmos. It's one of the oldest and most ambitious literary forms.

The conventions

Epics share a recognisable kit: a hero of great stature; a vast setting; deeds of valour; the involvement of gods or supernatural forces; an elevated, formal style; an opening invocation to a muse; a statement of theme; and a beginning in medias res — in the middle of the action — with earlier events filled in later. Stock epithets ("swift-footed Achilles") and long similes are hallmarks too.

Folk vs. literary epic

"Folk" or oral epics — Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf — grew out of spoken tradition before being written down. "Literary" epics were composed in writing by a single poet in conscious imitation of that tradition: Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost.

The epic's scope

What sets the epic apart is the size of its stakes. The hero's journey carries the values and destiny of a whole civilisation; the poem aims to define a culture to itself. Paradise Lost raises the scope further still — its subject is nothing less than the fall of humanity.

The afterlife of the epic

Few write verse epics now, but the impulse survives — in the sprawling novel, in film franchises, in any story that reaches for civilisational scale. The "mock-epic," which applies epic grandeur to trivial subjects for comic effect, shows how deeply the conventions are embedded in our sense of the grand.

Try Lexio

Look up "epic" like this — in any book, in any browser.

Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.

Try Lexio — free →