What happened to Epic Poetry?

[Anonymous No.18757439]

Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Nibelungenlied, Mahabharata, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost the list goes on but a question remains, where is the modern epic? The defining literary piece of a culture? Why do they no longer exist? what happened to them?

[Anonymous No.18757877]

This happened due to the new way in which we inform other people about things happening far away from us, or a long time ago.
Remember that those poems were memorized by the ancients, and were preserved in that form.
Now everything is stored in written prose (even this is getting lost), and most of people doesn't appreciate a good old song like the romance.
Also I'd correct you about the use of the word "epic"; generally this kind of works relate real events; the Divine Comedy isn't real as the Iliad was; Mio Cid was real, Martín Fierro not. Using the metre that is common on the ancient epics doesn't make it an epic.
Some recommendations of mine for more modern epics would be: La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla, Purén Indómito by Diego Arias de Saavedra and the medieval Mio Cid.

[Anonymous No.18758223]

>>18757439
>where is the modern epic? The defining literary piece of a culture? Why do they no longer exist? what happened to them?
What could you possibly write about? I suppose Book 1 could be about our hero’s morning commute and Book 2 could be about his YouTube subscriptions.

[Anonymous No.18758232]

>>18757439
Does modern life seem "epic" to you? What would they even write about? The epic day at the office?

[Anonymous No.18758236]

People still write it, and probably as many people read it as read Dante back in the day

[Anonymous No.18758252]

>>18757439
Epic poetry disapeared when myths were desacralized. Everyone and their mother knows that. Read the french structuralists. You are so far behind...

[Anonymous No.18758308]

>>18757439
>where is the modern epic?
Fingal and Temora were first printes 300 years ago mate

[Anonymous No.18758316]

>>18757439
Pan Tadeusz was so good that everyone else just gave up after it came out

[Anonymous No.18758547]

>>18757439
The Age of Myth is over at the invention of the alphabet. The world is no longer acoustic for literary people. All of the minor Gods died the day the printing press was invented. Now we only believe what we see. Story is paper, not oral.

[Anonymous No.18758586]

>>18757439
What a way to say you're a virgin.

[Anonymous No.18758659]

>>18758232
There was nothing "epic" about life for 99% of people back then either. Just swap working in an office all day for working on a small patch of dirt all day.

[Anonymous No.18759366]

>>18758252
Yeah except desacralization never occurred.

[Anonymous No.18759818]

>>18757439
Just watch the Avengers :)

[Anonymous No.18759830]

>>18757439
>where is the modern epic
Modernism produced the novel a form of epic mode. Bourgeois society produces hundreds of authoritative worshipped epics each century. Lolita is well respected for the 20th century. For the 19th my choice would be Zola’s cycle.

[Anonymous No.18759850]

Who knows

[Anonymous No.18759853]

>>18757439
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is unironically better than Homers. Some might call The Cantos one too.

[Anonymous No.18759875]

One thing I've wondered about is whether or not you could write an epic about the War in Afghanistan. I've been thinking about this more and more. Something about the nature of that long war, the futility of it all, feels very legitimately "epic" to me. About heroes fighting and questing after glory, not really knowing if the reason they're there is a good reason or not. Serving their nation, serving their gods, seeking after honor, but fearing that all will come to nothing and they'll die without acclaim. Isn't that somewhat like Homer, or the Medieval epics?

Not to mention all the urban legends about Afghanistan, the tales of giants in the caves, ghosts, of spirits, of strange creatures. You could weave a suitably epic tale out of Afghanistan, I think. Something worthy of being told in verse.

[Anonymous No.18759908]

>>18757439
>Why do they no longer exist? what happened to them?
They're too complicated to be popular.
Read Clarel, Tristam of Lyonesse, Zapolya, Sordello, Asolando, Milton, Jerusalem,

[Anonymous No.18759914]

>>18757439
>The old world, speaking strictly, knew but one poet, and named him "Homeros." The Greek word "Poietes," which [138] the Latins—unable to translate it—reproduced as" Poeta," recurs most naïvely among the Provençals as "Trouvère," and suggested to our Middle-high Germans the term of "Finder," Gottfried von Strassburg calling the poet of Parzival a "Finder wilder Märe" (" finder of strange tales "). That "poietes "—of whom Plato averred that he had found for the Greeks their gods—would seem to have been preceded by the "Seer," much as the vision of that ecstatic shewed to Dante the way through Hell and Heaven. But the prodigy of the Greeks' sole poet—"the"—seems to have been that he was seer and poet in one; wherefore also they represented him as blind, like Tiresias. Whom the gods meant to see no semblance, but the very essence of the world, they sealed his eyes; that he might open to the sight of mortals that truth which, seated in Plato's figurative cavern with their backs turned outwards, they theretofore could see in nothing but the shadows cast by Show, This poet, as "seer," saw not the actual (das Wirkliche), but the true (das Wahrhaftige), sublime above all actuality; and the fact of his being able to relate it so faithfully to hearkening men that to them it seemed as clear and tangible as anything their hands had ever seized—this turned the Seer to a Poet.

>[...] Whoso should seek to demonstrate the art of Homer, would have as hard a task before him as if he undertook to shew the genesis of a human being by the laborious experiments of some Professor—supramundane, if you will—of Chemistry and Physics. Nevertheless the work of Homer is no unconscious fashioning of Nature's, but something infinitely higher; perhaps, the plainest manifestation of a godlike knowledge of all that lives. Yet Homer was no Artist, but rather all succeeding poets took their art from him, and therefore is he called "the Father of Poetry" (Dichtkunst). All Greek genius is nothing else than an artistic réchauffé (Nachdichtung) of Homer; for purpose of this réchauffé, was first discovered and matured that "Techne" which at last we have raised to a general principle [139] under name of the Art of Poetry, wrongheadedly including in it the "poietes" or "Finder der Märe."

CONT

[Anonymous No.18759916]

>>18759914
>The "ars poetica" of the Latins may rank as art, and from it be derived the whole artifice of verse-and-rhyme-making to our present day. If Dante once again was dowered with the Seer's eye—for he saw the Divine, though not the moving shapes of gods, as Homer—when we come to Ariosto things have faded to the fanciful refractions of Appearance; whereas Cervantes spied between the glintings of such arbitrary fancies the old-poetic world-soul's cloven quick, and sets that cleavage palpably before us in the lifelike actions of two figures seen in dream. And then, as if at Time's last stroke, a Scotsman's "second sight" grows clear to full clairvoyance of a world of history now lying lost behind us in forgotten documents, and its facts he tells to us as truthful fairy-tales told cheerily to listening children. But from that ars poetica, to which these rare ones owed no jot, has issued all that calls itself since Homer "Epic poetry"; and after him we have to seek the genuine epic fount in tales and sagas of the Folk alone, where we find it still entirely undisturbed by art.

>To be sure, what nowadays advances from the feuilleton to clothe the walls of circulating libraries, has had to do with neither art nor poesy. The actually-experienced has at no time been able to serve as stuff for epic narration; and "second sight" for the never-witnessed does not bestow itself on the first romancer who passes by. A critic once blamed the departed Gutzkow for depicting a poet's love-affairs with baronesses and countesses, "things of which he certainly could never have had any personal experience"; the author most indignantly replied by thinly-veiled allu sions to similar episodes that actually had happened to himself. On neither side could the unseemly folly of our novel-writing have been more cryingly exposed.—Goethe, on the other hand, proceeded in his "Wilhelm Meister" as the artist to whom the poet had refused his collaboration in discovery of a satisfactory ending; in his "Wahlverwandtschaften" the lyric elegist worked himself into a [140] seer of souls, but not as yet of living shapes. But what Cervantes had seen as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, dawned on Goethe's deep world-scrutiny as Faust and Mephistopheles; and these shapes beheld by his ownest eye now haunt the seeking artist as the riddle of an ineffable poet's-dream, which he thought, quite un-artistically but thoroughly sincerely, to solve in an impossible drama.

CONT

[Anonymous No.18759920]

>>18759916
>There may be something to learn from this, even for our members of the "German Poets'-grove" who feel neglected by their none too ardent publishers. For alas! one must say of their novels, their spirit's ripest fruits, that they have sprung from neither life nor tradition, but simply from theft and traduction. If neither the Greeks at their prime, nor any later great nation of culture, such as the Italians and Spaniards, could win from passing incidents the matter for an epic story, to you moderns this will presumably come a trifle harder: for the events they witnessed, at least were real phenomena; whilst ye, in all that rules, surrounds and dwells in you, can witness naught but masquerades tricked out with rags of culture from the wardrobe-shop and tags from the historical marine-store. The seer's eye for the ne'er-experienced the gods have always lent to none but their believers, as ye may ascertain from Homer or Dante. But ye have neither faith nor godliness.
- Wagner's On Poetry and Composition

[Anonymous No.18759921]

>>18759875
if they can write the old testament about an area as tiny and irrelevant (at the time), then an epic about afghanistan would be a piece of piss

[Anonymous No.18759939]

>>18759920
>If we wish to imagine a true paradise for the productivity of the human spirit we must transfer ourselves to the time before writing on parchment or paper was invented. That is where we will find that the whole of the cultural life was born which is now preserved only as the object of refection or some practical application. For poetry was here none other than a real invention of myths, i.e., of ideal processes in which human life was reflected in accordance with its varying character with objective reality in the sense of direct spectral apparitions. We see a capacity for this as belonging to every noble people until the moment when it acquired the use of writing. From then on it loses its poetic strength: its living language hitherto formed by a constant natural development degenerates into a process of crystallisation and petrifies; the art of poetry becomes the art of embellishing the old myths which are no longer capable of reinvention and finally becomes mere rhetoric and dialectic.
- Wagner's Beethoven

[Anonymous No.18760011]

>>18757439
It ended when virtue was replaced by Christianity. Seriously, there were no epics like the ones you speak of written after that, try and find one.

[Anonymous No.18760040]

each civilisation gets a couple of works of that importance over the course of thousands of years. The fact one does not arise in our lifetime is not odd.

Also atheism.

[Anonymous No.18760321]

>>18758659
But potential for a heroic life, a hero existed. It doesn’t exist now. Alexander failed to be Achilles because he didn’t live in Achilles’ time. We all fail to be Alexander, or Napoleon, or anyone really, because we don’t live in their time. In the epic hierarchy, we are somewhere near the bottom, perhaps even below it.

[Anonymous No.18760331]

>>18758659
Also, I don’t know how you thought you were even making an argument. It’s like you couldn’t tell that Homer’s Iliad isn’t about some run of the mill farmer…

[Anonymous No.18760338]

>>18759875
I’ve thought about this. You definitely couldn’t write an epic poem about it. Could you write an epic novel? Maybe but I doubt it. Epics are sung about heroes and they’re broadly received into and by the culture. In this culture, the war in Afghanistan is something that’s reprehensible. Where’s the heroism in it? You’d be shunned by the literary community for even daring to write about it unless the hero was a young afghan boy.

[Anonymous No.18760340]

>>18759875
Also, there were no gods in Afghanistan. For the Afghans and Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, sure but not for Westerners. That was not a religious war for them and they even come from civilizations which are no longer even religious.

[Anonymous No.18760344]

>>18760011
>Seriously, there were no epics like the ones you speak of written after that, try and find one.
Parzifal.

[Anonymous No.18760345]

>>18760338
Because there's no fantasy or folklore about it. It's too psychological. I wonder if a science-fiction epic could be made (not like Aniara, more like pic related)

[Anonymous No.18760350]

>>18760345

[Anonymous No.18760351]

>>18760345
I think it could be done obviously but it wouldn’t be received like you wanted to. There’s something about epics which are intertwined with the culture and the fact is our culture is just deficient in whatever nutrients it is which are needed and allow such a thing to blossom. I really think that.

[Anonymous No.18760360]

>>18760345
>>18760350
Mishima thought that sci fi would create something like an epic in our time because it was the only genre that could transcend humanist values, which really are nowhere to be found in epic poetry as far as I can tell.

[Anonymous No.18760374]

>>18760351
Yeah, I suppose conventional epics are intertwined with culture.

I suppose you could not even write a humorous, farcical epic about our modern times. I'm sure you could still write something; write an epic about a modern-day strigoi hunter or something or other, World of Darkness/ KULT style. There are still virginal forests in Romania, we've seen things there. There are still villages and traditions. You just need to cash in on the dichotomy between industrial society and ancestral society (and their opposing cultures and breeds of humans, as well as conspiracies surrounding them, i.e., electronics employ goetian sigils, a lot of mountains are really just stumps of giant trees, elites doing rituals).

[Anonymous No.18760411]

>>18760321
>But potential for a heroic life, a hero existed
You can still be a hero now you dipshit. There's plenty of conflicts going on in the world you can try to go fight in if you want to be a hero so bad. Plus a hero is not necessarily some epic sword and sandal war lord. Someone like Beethoven, or Michelangelo, or even Christ could be considered culture heroes.

>>18760331
Yeah, and a modern epic likely wouldn't be about working in an office either. As the other anon pointed out you could maybe write an epic about Afghanistan. Also, Hesiod's Works and Days is technically an epic and it's literally about farm work.

[Anonymous No.18760438]

>>18760338
>Epics are sung about heroes and they’re broadly received into and by the culture.

But what you're missing is the extent to which the epic poems THEMSELVES help with this reception. Achilles would not be what he is in Greek culture without Homer. Sure, he existed as as cultural figure before Homer, but Homer supercharged him. Epics don't just take a figure already enmeshed into a culture and elevate them after the fact. Epics actively take part in the enmeshing, in the reception. Epics are active participants in the creation of hero myths and cultural legends.

In that regard, a modern solider could indeed have an epic written about him, if the poet was skillful enough.

[Anonymous No.18760489]

>>18760411
>You can still be a hero now you dipshit.
No, you can’t. You even pointed out here that you could write an epic about Afghanistan, but you literally could not. Soldiers in Afghanistan are closer to workers than heroes, and they’re near universally despised for their involvement in a despised war. You’re simply deluding yourself.

[Anonymous No.18760498]

>>18760438
I think you’re the one that’s missing something. Homer didn’t pull Achilles out of thin air. There’s something there in the soil of theculture, or maybe from the gods, that allows for the various aspects which make Achilles who he is and Homer didn’t invent them in a vacuum. I mean, we don’t even know that Achilles was an exclusively fictional character. He very well may have been a real person or inspired by a real person.

[Anonymous No.18760539]

>>18760489
>you literally could not
Yes you literally could. There is literally nothing stopping you from writing an epic about Seal Team 6 killing Bin Laden or some shit.

[Anonymous No.18760547]

>>18757877
>(even this is getting lost)
Replaced with what? Video?

[Anonymous No.18760627]

>>18760539
There is and you’re simply deluding yourself otherwise. I mean, do you think that exact premise hasn’t been turned into a novel? It has. Nobody cares about them. When we talk about “an epic” in the context of this thread, we’re talking about an Iliad, a Parzifal, not some novel about a war no one cares about in an epoch where being a hero not only something people don’t aspire to but is also unfathomable. I mean, you live in a time where respected journalists talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe as this generation’s Iliad. Face it. You live in a culturally, spiritually, heroically impoverished epoch where the thing that made epic poetry epic poetry just doesn’t even exist. And if I’m wrong, prove me wrong. Go write it. My wager is that no one will care about your Afghanistan book and they certainly won’t find it a heroic epic poem among the likes of Homer’s or the Sagas or something. You live in a time where heroism is all but impossible and I really just see that as a statement of fact at this point.

[Anonymous No.18760672]

This thread seems like it's playing around with the definition of what constitutes an "epic poem." Would even Paradise Lost be considered an epic according to what some of the people in this thread are saying? It sounds like it wouldn't.

[Anonymous No.18760724]

>>18760627
What exactly is it that makes you think people don't aspire to be heroes or hero worship? Again, a hero does not necessarily have to be a war hero. A lot of people might view Martin Luther King as a hero, others might view Neil Armstrong as a hero, /pol/tards view Trump as a hero. And as far as it being impossible to write an epic about Afghanistan, I still disagree. Whatever war, battle, or raid the Iliad was based on almost certainly would've been forgotten by history if no one bothered to tell about it. The same with Afghanistan, if you can write a truly great piece of literature about it then maybe it won't be so forgotten.

[Anonymous No.18760846]

>>18760547
>Video
Exactly, people knows to read, but doesn't understand anything what on the paper is; the only thing they barely understands are videos.
>>18760040
>Also atheism
Maybe; atheism gives that perception of not much trascendentalness in the acts of the mankind.
>>18760011
>when virtue was replaced by Christianity
Shut up, you are forgetting all the glorious epics from the middle ages (Roldan, Cid Campeador, Charlemagne) and renaicensse writters like Alonso de Ercilla.

Also lads, don't forget that until the arrival of radio, most of big events in many parts of the world werenarrated trough songs; examples of this are in Latin America, where you can find a lot of historical passages in folkloric songs; not composed in the style used in the Iliad, but pretty nice btw.

[Anonymous No.18761222]

>>18757439
>>18758232
You can read rap music lyrics about niggers robbing stores and murdering one another....for the clout of course