Epic poetry
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 03/02/2019

Epic poetry, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9418 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Epic_poetry
#Narrative_poems
#Fiction
#Fiction_forms
Epic poetry

An epic poem, epic, epos, or epopee is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily involving a time beyond living memory in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary men and women who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the moral universe that their descendants, the poet and his audience, must understand to understand themselves as a people or nation.

Another type of epic poetry is epyllion (plural: epyllia), which is a brief narrative poem with a romantic or mythological theme. The term, which means "little epic", came into use in the nineteenth century. It refers primarily to the erudite, shorter hexameter poems of the Hellenistic period and the similar works composed at Rome from the age of the neoterics; to a lesser degree, the term includes some poems of the English Renaissance, particularly those influenced by Ovid. The most famous example of classical epyllion is perhaps Catullus 64.

The English word "epic" comes from the Latin "epicus", which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective ("epikos"), from ("epos"), "word, story, poem".

Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received in tradition and add to the epic in their performances. Hence aside from writers like Dante, Camões, and Milton, Apollonius of Rhodes in his "Argonautica" and Virgil in "Aeneid" adopted and adapted Homer's style and subject matter, but used devices available only to those who write, and in their works Nonnus' "Dionysiaca" and Tulsidas' "Sri Ramacharit Manas" also used stylistic elements typical of epics.

The oldest epic recognized is the "Epic of Gilgamesh" (), which was recorded In ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire. The poem details the exploi...