Epic Poetry

In a brief moment of insanity I once decided to put up extensive analyses of the two epic poems I've read, The Odyssey and Paradise Lost, but then I came back to my senses.  Instead, here are some general facts about epic poetry.

Poems begin with an invocation of the muse.  Basically, this is a passage where the author as himself (and it is almost always a him) calls upon the god of epic poetry, or sometimes of something else, to help him write a good poem.  It usually takes up the first few pages.  A good example of this is in The Odyssey, which begins "Sing to me of the man, Muse".  The man would in this case be Odysseus.

A common feature of epic poetry is something called an epic simile.  A simile is a comparison using the word like or as, such as "the sun was like an orange".  An epic simile is basically the same thing, except it goes on for several lines and often brings the plot dragging to a halt.

There are some other fun details about epic poems, but those are the important aspects of understanding them.  Epic poetry can really be decent; the translation I read of The Odyssey was quite smooth reading.  Don't let the idea scare you too much.

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