Epic

Much like a ballad, an epic is a narrative poem that spins a tale—a lengthy one—of a hero’s great valor and adventure.

Much like the elegy, epics derive from ancient Greece, where epikós meant “speech,” “tale,” or “song,” and applied not only to the subject matter but to a specific type of meter, the Epic meter.

The first epics of Western literature are the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, and in the English tradition we have Beowulf, Spencer’s The Fairie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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