"Epic poetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not, we think of him, not because he is witty, because he was melancholy, because he was filial; but we love him because he existed, and was himself. This is the sum total of the impression. I believe that, of every other character either in tragic or epic poetry, the story makes part of the conception; but of Hamlet, the deep and permanent interest is the conception of himself. This seems to belong, not to the character being more perfectly drawn, but to there being a more intense conception of individual human life ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... lands. There they did their work. They made their calling and election sure. Greek architecture—one birth of beauty after another—was born. Athens was crowned with marvellous temples, whose exquisite proportions amaze and charm us to-day—inimitable creations of beauty. Homer came, and then epic poetry was born. AEschylus and tragedy came; Pindar and the lyric song; Theophrastus and pastoral music; Anacreon and the strain which bears his special name. And so Phidias and his companions created sculpture, Herodotus history, Demosthenes oratory, Plato and Aristotle philosophy, Zeuxis painting, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Purgatory, Canto XI. His "Canzone sopra il Terreno Amore" was thought worthy of being illustrated by numerous and ample commentaries. Crescimbeni Ist. della Volg. Poes. l. v. For a playful sonnet which Dante addressed to him, and a spirited translation of it, see Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... of Pius AEneas from Ilion.' Perhaps so, but at present the dreamy spirit of Antiquity knows not one word of the story. In a thousand years' time he will have heard of it, possibly, and then he will carefully consider those two 'retirements' as subjects for epic poetry." ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... field of literature had been so thoroughly covered by the great writers of Hellas, that it was hard for the imitative Roman to be original. As far as epic poetry was concerned, Rome had poor material with which to deal: neither her mythology—the most prosaic and business-like of all mythologies—nor her history seemed to give any real scope for the epic writer. The Greek mythology was ready to hand, but it was hard for ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... epic poetry, because the critics agree it is the greatest work human nature is capable of. I know the French have already laid down many mechanical rules for compositions of this sort, but at the same time they cut off ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Schelling and his philosophy, which received more than one impulse from Herder's ideas; nor to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical system and defended them with his wonderful dialectics. But F.A. Wolf, when he points out to us in Homer the process of epic poetry; Niebuhr, in revealing to us the growth of Rome, the birth of her religious and national legends, the slow, gradual formation of her marvellous constitution; Savigny, when he proves that the Roman civil law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... some ballads may be claimed as distinctly popular, and, so to speak, impersonal in matter and in origin. It would be easy to show that survivals out of this stage of inartistic lyric poetry linger in the early epic poetry of Homer and in the French epopees, and that the Greek drama sprang from the sacred choruses of village vintagers. In the great early epics, as in popular ballads, there is the same directness and simplicity, the same use of recurring epithets, the "green grass," the "salt sea," the "shadowy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... there are no two single lines in American poetry which express better the deeper meaning of love than these: — I marvel that God made you mine, For when He frowns 't is then ye shine. In his later lectures at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, contrasting the heroines of epic poetry with the lyric woman of modern times, — the patient wife in the secure home, — he said: "But the daily grandeurs which every good wife, no matter how uneventful her lot, must achieve, the secret endurances which not only have no poet to sing them, but no human eye even to see them, the heroism ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians, even in their epic poetry, are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greek writers, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are indeed some strokes of it in the ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... epic poetry in sustainedness. One form of poetry runs into another imperceptibly, as darkness into daylight or daylight into darkness, so that the dividing line can not be certified. Lyric poetry may be dramatic in spirit, as Browning's "The Ring and the Book;" or dramatic ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... nevertheless (after due investigation), to put my reader in possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction to singing ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... inspiring song, and were the patrons of poets and musicians. According to Hesiod they were nine in number and presided over the arts. Urania was the Goddess of Astronomy, and Calliope the Goddess of Epic Poetry. They are described as the daughters of Zeus, and Homer alludes to them as the goddesses of song who dwelt on the summit of Mount Olympus. They were the companions of Apollo, and accompanied with song his playing on the lyre ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... the same lines as those followed now by the Nobel Prize distribution—at any rate as regards literature. His idea was to secure a small independence for prize-takers in tragedy, comedy, opera, fiction, Christian philosophy, linguistic or archaeological research, and epic poetry, by awarding them a capital of a hundred thousand francs, and even two hundred thousand to poets, and to open thus an easier way to position and fame. Finding that his programme was not acceptable to the more influential ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... fragmentary, seven or eight charming lyric pieces. The near relationship of the Slavic nations among each other, is exhibited in no feature more strikingly than in their national popular poetry, especially in the little lyric songs, the immediate effusion of their feelings, wishes, and cares; whilst epic poetry, which draws her materials from the external world, must hence, in every nation, be in some measure modified by their different fortunes and situations. With the exception of this manuscript and a few scattered love-songs and tales, all ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... generates mythology; in union with imagination and reason, it gives birth to theology and cosmogony; in union with imagination, reason, and experience, it is the source of philosophy; in union with the same, together with the artistic sense and high degrees of imaginative sympathy, it creates epic poetry and art. Its total outcome, however, may be included under the term Belief. And it results from an assumed validity of consciousness, that universal belief is always an indication of universal truth. At the same time, since this master-power finds expression ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
