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 any word 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 →