"Epic poem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Satire. The Excellency of Epic Satire above others, as adding Example to Precept, and animating by Fable and sensible Images. Epic Satire compar'd with Epic Poem, and wherein they differ: Of their Extent, Action, Unities, Episodes, and the Nature of their Morals. Of Parody: Of the Style, Figures, and Wit proper to this Sort of Poem, and the superior Talents requisite ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty which I am told bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following Epic Poem. I beg to quote the emphatic language of my estimable friend (if he will allow me to call him so), the Black Bear in Piccadilly, and to assure all to whom these presents may come, that "I am the original." This affecting legend is given in the following pages precisely as I have frequently ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... superintendence, obtained an excellent reception. From 1829 to 1833, he produced for "Murray's Family Library" his most esteemed prose work, "The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," in six volumes. "The Maid of Elvar," an epic poem in the Spenserian stanza, connected with the chivalrous enterprise displayed in the warfare between Scotland and England, during the reign of Henry VIII., was published in 1832. His admirable edition of the works of Robert Burns appeared in 1834, and 5000 copies were speedily sold.[8] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... you do, let me know," responded Hippy, "and I'll write an epic poem about you that will make the world sit ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... amongst them his Hengist and Mey, and the Elegy on Mary. About the same time he wrote for the Whitehall Evening Post. But his mind was now attracted to a more splendid project. This was a translation of the great Epic Poem of Portugal, the Lusiad of Camoens, which had as yet been represented to the English reader only through the inadequate version of Fanshaw. That nothing might hinder his prosecution of this labour, he resigned his employment at Oxford, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... to Homer and epic poetry, for the philosopher evidently draws his illustration from something familiar to everybody. It had become a Greek common-place 350 B.C., and probably long before, that an epic poem, such as the Iliad or Odyssey, is cyclical, and that both together make ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... be very fine, but was not finished when I was last at Paris. I was much pleased with the person that slept against St. Lambert's poem: I wish I had thought of the nostrum, when Mr. Seward, a thousand years ago, at Lyons, would read an epic poem to me just as I had received a dozen letters from England. St. Lambert is a great Jackanapes, and a very tiny genius: I suppose the poem was The Seasons, which is four fans spun out into a Georgic. If I had not been too ill, I should ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... long lease of a healthful existence, and go on 'prospering and to prosper.' . . . THE reader will be amused we think with the 'Veritable Sea-Story,' told by our friend HARRY FRANCO, in a species of poetry run mad, in preceding pages. He writes us: 'I send you an epic poem for the KNICKERBOCKER, founded on facts within my own personal experience. I mention this lest you should deem it destitute of merit; for it possesses the greatest merit that any human composition can possess; namely, truth. And in this respect, if in no other, my poem is beyond dispute superior ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... matters of religion at any rate, however humble he may, be, it is instructive to treat him as a philosopher. The art of learning is to accept the teachings of everything, from a blade of grass to an epic poem. Hamed moralised in angry mood. All the better. Neither flattery nor ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.—Sir Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles—she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... living source losing, in the regulated channels to which they are confined, their force, depth and impetuosity. Real poetry, able to convey dream and illusion, cannot be brought forth. Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.[3227] Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,[3228] pouring out his heart to relieve himself. When a creation of characters ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... crush them, they gave up a conflict which they never afterwards resumed; leaving the Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they came in contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from them. It is a subject for an epic poem, and whatever admiration is due to the heroism of a brave people whom no inequality of strength could appal and no defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of us. The story of the war was well known in Europe: and Hawkins, in coasting the western shores of South ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;—(I forget which,) besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;—for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... absorbing an unwashed goat; who makes no attempt to separate the essential from the accidental—the utterance of inspiration from the garrulity of hopeless nescience; who forgets that it is half an epic poem filled with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, may, like the ass which Balaam rode, open its mouth and speak; but he never saw the Angel of the Lord; he utters the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late), Mr. Hobbes, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should have ended it. He tells us that the first beauty of an Epic poem consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers; now the words are the colouring of the work, which in the order of nature is the last to be considered. The design, the disposition, the manners, and ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... love songs—the Mistress—is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject—the Davideis—now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist and followed the exiled court to France. Side by side with the Church poets were the cavaliers—Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others—gallant courtiers and officers in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... write frequently, sending me large specimens of an epic poem which he was then composing, and desiring my remarks and corrections. These I gave him from time to time, but endeavour'd rather to discourage his proceeding. One of Young's Satires[41] was then just published. I copy'd and sent him a great part of it, which set in a strong light the ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... a capital translation of the elegant and richly-coloured pastoral epic poem of M. Mistral which, in 1859, he dedicated in enthusiastic terms to Lamartine... It would be hard to overpraise the sweetness and pleasing ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, whereas the well-born ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... SMITH, namely, a personal dislike to the poet, may we place the severe mortification which the unfortunate translator of Camoens suffered from the person to whom he dedicated "The Lusiad." The Duke of Buccleugh was the pupil of the great political economist, and so little valued an epic poem, that his Grace had not even the curiosity to open the leaves ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... an epic poem of which she was the heroine and Harcourt the hero? The true epics of the world are generally told in ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... a wall till her head spins. There always seem to be so many more where the last one came from. She listens to oar-beats, and drum-beats, and heart-beats. She improvises sonatas and gallopades, oratorios and mazourkas. She perpetrates the title and first line of an epic poem, goes through the alphabet for a rhyme, and none appearing, she repeats the first line by way of encouragement. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... as good as his word. That very evening he called on Kumodini Babu, whom he found reading the Mahabharata (an epic poem). After dwelling now on this matter, now on that, he ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... (1474-1533), whose great poem Orlando Furioso displayed a powerful imagination no less than a rare and cultivated taste; and the unhappy mad Tasso (1544-1595), who in Jerusalem Delivered produced a bulky epic poem, adapting the manner of Virgil to a crusading subject, and in Aminta gave to his countrymen a delightful pastoral drama, the exquisite lyrics of which were long sung ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the lyre of the Scottish plowman, and stayed the life of the German priest? God, God, and God alone; and as surely as these were raised up by God, inspired by God, was Abraham Lincoln; and a thousand years hence, no drama, no tragedy, no epic poem, will be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with deeper feeling, than that which tells the story of his ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... Ozell, Oldisworth, and Broome, was greeted with scorn. Trapp, in the preface to his Virgil, refers to the new French fashion with true insular contempt. Segrais' translation is "almost as good as the French language will allow, which is just as fit for an epic poem as an ambling nag is for a war horse.... Their language is excellent for prose, but quite otherwise for verse, especially heroic. And therefore tho' the translating of poems into prose is a strange modern invention, yet the French transprosers are so far in the right ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... human passions, affections, and desires, and distinguished only from sublunary beings by superior power and the gift of immortality. We are interested in them as we are in the genii or magicians of an eastern romance. There is a sort of aerial epic poem going on between earth and heaven. They take sides in the terrestrial combat, and engage in the actual strife with the heroes engaged in it. Mars and Venus were wounded by Diomede when combating in the Trojan ranks; their blood, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... that the Poet Laureate,—Homer, will be invited to compose an epic poem commemorating the events of the raid. An edition of 20,000 copies will be issued, including 50 on India paper, with corruptions ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... character. Civilization is a relative arbitrary term; and the ancestors whom we are pleased to term uncivilized, may have possessed as high a degree of mental culture as ourselves, though it unquestionably differed in kind. Job wrote his epic poem in a state of society which we should probably term uncultivated; and when Lamech gave utterance to the most ancient and the saddest of human lyrics, the world was in its infancy, and it would appear as if the first artificer ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... wishes of their favorite. A poetical description of the wars he waged with the Cheta is to be found in long lines of hieroglyphics on the south wall of the hall of columns of Rameses II. at Karnal, also at Luxor and in the Sallier Papyrus, and an epic poem referring to his mighty deeds in no less than six ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... feelings of the passions are very different when excited by poetical fictions, from what they are when they are from belief and reality. A passion, which is disagreeable in real life, may afford the highest entertainment in a tragedy, or epic poem. In the latter case, it lies not with that weight upon us: It feels less firm and solid: And has no other than the agreeable effect of exciting the spirits, and rouzing the attention. The difference in the ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... It may throw light upon it, but it nips one's imagination and dispels the mystery. The puzzling fragments one hears at concerts will take on splendid proportions on account of all the mind adds to them. That epic poem of the Niebelungen was once like a forest in our dreams, where strange and awful beings flashed before our vision and then vanished. Later on, when we had explored all its paths, we discovered that order and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... of Rudiae, was taken to Rome by Cato the Younger. Here he supported himself by teaching Greek. His epic poem, the Annales, relates the traditional Roman history, from the arrival of Aeneas ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... occasions, by no means frequent, when some striking or remarkable expressions of a speaker, or contemporary writer, are to be preserved. Unity of style and expression is as indispensable in a history which is to move the heart, or fascinate the imagination, as in a tragedy, a painting, or an epic poem. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... greater objection could be brought against Blackmore's Prince Arthur, than those raised by Mr. Dennis, the Poem would be faultless; for what has the doctrine of the church of England to do with an epic poem? It is not the doctrine of the church of England, to suppose that the apostate spirits put the power of the Almighty to proof, by openly resisting his will, and maintaining an obstinate struggle with the angels commissioned by him, to drive them from the mansions of the bless'd; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... an edition of Not a Man and Yet a Man and The Rape of Florida, adding to these a collection of miscellaneous poems, Drifted Leaves, and in 1901 he published An Idyl of the South, an epic poem in two parts. It is to be regretted that he did not have the training that comes from the best university education. He had the taste and the talent to benefit from such culture in the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... a small book of prayer, which even now is a chief constituent part of the small bookshops of the Hessian peasant-folk, so precious to him because of the divine power of its influence, to his mind a pure, old, genuine "Jesus wine." This was the well known "Habermaennchen," the epic poem and the private chapel of the warrior as well as of the serving man. And not alone with the exalted spectacle of divine omnipotence on the furious or rapturous sea—but even in the camps and quarters the masses of soldiers did not neglect public worship any ...
— The Voyage of The First Hessian Army from Portsmouth to New York, 1776 • Albert Pfister
... This epic poem on the foundation of Rome by a colony from Troy is based on an old Latin tradition, and is modelled on the form of the poems of Homer. The first six books remind the student of the adventures of Ulysses in the "Odyssey," while the last ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of an important and heroic event, it should be simple, direct, and dignified in its treatment. The incidents should be introduced in a natural order, and their prominence should be regulated according to their relative importance. In an epic poem, as in every other creation of art, the law of symmetry ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... struck with it, that being at that time profuse of legendary lore, he inserted it in the shape of a note to Waverley, the first of his romantic offences. Had he then known, as he now does, the value of such a story, it is likely that, as directed in the inimitable receipt for making an epic poem, preserved in the Guardian, he would have kept ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Wild may already have begun to captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have his own word for assigning "some years" to the writing of Tom Jones; it is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the first English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as the summer ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Tantaene animis? Can great minds descend to such absurdity? But worse still: that he may bear down every argument in favor of these poems, he triumphantly drags forward a passage, in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathize. It is the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora.' 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light; the green hills are covered with day; trees shake their dusty heads in the breeze.' And this this gorgeous, yet simple imagery, where all is alive and panting with immortality-this, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the Scottish plowman, and stayed the life of the German priest? God, God, and God alone; and as surely as these were raised up by God, inspired by God, was Abraham Lincoln; and a thousand years hence, no drama, no tragedy, no epic poem will be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with deeper feeling than that which tells the story ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... no discussion on the nature of the epopea, nor attempt to prove by any latitude of reasoning that I have written an Epic Poem. The subject indeed is vast; far superior to any one of those on which the celebrated poems of this description have been constructed; and I have no doubt but the form I have given to the work is the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... peevish canon of friend Horace. The AEneid, you know, begins just as he says an epic ought not to begin; and the AEneid is the greatest Latin Epic. In the next place the use of Modesty is to keep a man from writing an epic poem at all but, if he will have that impudence, why then he had better have the courage to plunge into the Castalian stream, like Virgil and Lucan, not crawl in funking and holding on by the Muse's apron-string. But—excuse me —quorsum haec tam putida ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... century the colonists were still too busy with the conquest and settlement of the country to spare time for the cultivation of letters. A long page 287 epic poem, the Poema heroico de San Ignacio de Loyola, with much Gongorism and little merit, was published at Madrid in 1696, after the death of the author, the Colombian Hernando Dominguez Camargo. A few short lyrics by the same author also appeared in the Ramillete de varias flores poeticas ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... are pleased to be advised, is engaged upon an epic poem, which has been meditated several years. The Jacob Leisler of Mrs. Oaksmith is probably the finest specimen of dramatic writing of which we can boast. Her other tragedy, The Roman Tribute, is in rehearsal in Philadelphia, where it will be produced with a strong cast and the utmost ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... moreover, generally drawn from nature, while the satire is for the most part curiously associated and sparklingly witty. The characters are sketched with amazing firmness and freedom, and though sometimes grotesque, are yet not often overcharged. It is professedly an epic poem, but it may be more properly described as a poetical novel. Nor can it be said to inculcate any particular moral, or to do more than unmantle the decorum of society. Bold and buoyant throughout, it exhibits a free irreverent knowledge of the world, laughing or mocking as the thought serves, in ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the epic poem is even less direct than that which is portrayed in the drama; for there the poet does not impersonate the agents in the story, but describes them. His description is the first thing which we get; we get the action only indirectly through that. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker |
