It has none of the hampering qualities of classic or English metres, or of the metres in the later Indian epics when the quantity of every syllable was determined.
Abstract philosophy, concrete science and barren theology remain arid and unemotional discourses even in the epics of Dante and Milton.
I have expressly ignored most of the great authors who wrote epics and dramas in verse, and also most of the great English verse poets, for I wish to arrive at a conception of poetry chiefly from prose examples.
As Mr. Quiggin says, the Tain is of interest as showing the preliminary stage through which the epics of all other nations had gone.
While all of these epics contain beautiful passages and poems of glowing and even unsurpassed beauty, they keep man back in the primitive stage, and countenance a state of barbarism that he should outgrow.
But it is not unlikely that the Javanese adaptations of the Indian epics which have come down to us were preceded by earlier attempts which have disappeared.
Footnote 423: Episodes of the Indian epics have also been used as the subjects of Javanese dramas.
The Spanish ballad epic is a characteristic example of the epics formed by the earliest poetic genius of a country, on the basis of the patriotic stories of national origin that had been accumulating for centuries.
Virgil began the most famous of Roman epics in the year 30 B.
In Iceland, a new heroic literature was invented in the middle ages, and to this we owe the Sagas, which are, in fact, a reduction to prose of the epics of the warlike history of the North.
That antiquity did not regard these other epics as equal in beauty to the Iliad seems to be certain; but such poems as Cypria, Iliou Persis (Sack of Ilion) and Aethiopis can hardly but have exhibited other sides of the epic tradition.
This is not to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either.
The Icelandic epics seem to have been shorter and more episodical in character than the lost Teutonic specimens; both kinds were written in alliterative verse.
The most splendid of all the epics of Italy, however, was, and remains, the Jerusalem Delivered of Torquato Tasso (q.
The Magyar novel was then in its infancy, being chiefly represented by the historico-epics of Josika.
The success of the Italian imitative epics of the 15th century led to some imitation of their form in Spain.
The existing masterpiece of this kind, the magnificent Roland, is doubtless the most interesting and pleasing of all the epics of medieval Europe.
The Teutonic epics were obscure and intense, the French chansons de geste are lucid and easy.
It is notable that both the Iliad and Odyssey were unhesitatingly ascribed to Homer until the eve of the Christian era, when certain Greek writers advanced the thesis that the epics were the work of different authors.
Indian epics contain many notices of numerous demigods, and the planets are also deified.
These great epics are of the widest mythological importance, determining, as they do, as much as the Hesiodic poems, the character and status of the Greek divinities.
The success of 'Leonidas' was probably one cause of the swarm of epicswhich appeared in the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The earlier national epics of Naevius and Ennius had framed certain lines for Roman epic poetry, which it was almost bound to follow.
Varius, when he abandoned tragedy, wrote epics on the death of Julius Caesar, and on the achievements of Agrippa.
And next we have to consider all the great Epics in the world.
No work in Europe, not Homer in Greece or Virgil in Italy, not Shakespeare or Milton in English-speaking lands, is the national property of the nations to the same extent as the Epics of India are of the Hindus.
It may be that the prose epics originated in paraphrases of early poems such as we find, for instance, in the Völsunga Saga, which is a paraphrase of older poems dealing with the story of Sigurthr.
It had already long possessed a respectable position as a vehicle of romance, and the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries were pre-eminently the time when the epics of chivalry were re-edited and extended in prose.
An immense outburst of epic and narrative verse has taken place, and lyrical poetry, not limited as in the case of the epics to the north of France, but extending from Roussillon to the Pas de Calais, completes this.
The early epics lose something of their savage charms, the polished literature of Provence quickly perishes.
The latter, in his Bibliotheque des romans, worked up a large number of the old epics into a form suited to the taste of the century.
The realisation of such passion, however, is not necessarily confined to writers of epics and lyrics.
He rarely ground out epics now when his brain was tired and full of Government stationery and sealing-wax.
These Gathas were evidently composed in different Prakrit forms (during a period of disintegration) before the more modern type of Sanscrit was fixed by the rules of Panini, and the popular epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Marriage as treated in the epics is seldom based on love.
This is an incident often referred to in epics and dramas.
The woman wooes, the man grants: nearly always in these epics we read of a woman who loves, rarely of one who is loved.
Palmer of Harvard--versions which are far more poetic than any translations in verse ever made and which make of these epics two of the most entertaining novels ever written.
Max Müller places the Kalevala on a level with the greatest epics of the world.
Grimm says that no poem is to be compared with it in this respect, unless it be some of the epics of India.
For the occurrences of many centuries, among them the separation of sundry peoples and races, erroneously traced to Central Asia alone, were in these immortal epics compressed within the scope of single dramas made to occupy but a few years.
One acquainted with the real meaning of the ancient epicscannot refrain from asking himself whether these intuitional Orientalists prefer being called deceivers or deceived, and in charity give them the benefit of the doubt.
The epics of this group are Ortnit, Hugdietrich, Wolfdietrich, the latter with its pathetic episode of the unswerving loyalty of Wolfdietrich's vassal Duke Berchtung and his ten sons.
The epics of Mistral, if we may venture to use the term, are, with the exception of Lamartine's Jocelyn, the most remarkable long narrative poems that have been produced in France in modern times.
It completes the symmetry of his life work; the formerepics extolled the life of the fields, the mountains, and the sea, the last glorifies the beautiful river that brings life to his native soil.
There is a certain mistiness in Klopstock's great epic that reminds one of the shadowy atmosphere in which the heroes of the Ossianic epics are enveloped.
They are taken exclusively from the epics of Fingal and Temora: Morna, and Cairbar and Grudar from Fingal, Book i; Cuchullin to Connal, and Comal and Galvina from Bk.
Modern poets have been apt to disregard this canon of common-sense: the underplots of many plays and the episodes of such epics as the Orlando of Ariosto are not sufficiently subordinated to the main design or interwoven with it.
Homer in both his epics presents us with the spectacle of crime punished.
The poetry consisted chiefly of the epics of Homer and Hesiod, the elegiacs of Tyrtæus, Solon, Theognis, etc.
In this way we read tragedy heroically, comedy conversationally, elegiacs thrillingly, epics sustainedly, lyrics musically, and dirges softly and plaintively.
It may be based either on history or tradition, though in our greatest epics there is a commingling of the two.
A large part of our greatest epics is in dialogue.
The most sympathetic characters in the history of Japan have thus ended their days, and many popular heroes of national epics thus gave up their lives.
And if they have a superfluous coin, they can go to the theatres, where national epics are performed in the old-fashioned fascinating style, and where a penny gives admittance from morning to night.
The author will be gratified should he succeed in exciting interest in the troubled lives of our Norse forefathers, and still more so if his difficult experiment brings readers to the Sagas--to the prose epics of our own race.
The very scope of its subject, if nothing more, classes it with the more universal epics of literature rather than with the poems that portray only a single aspect of life.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "epics" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
