Supernaturalism was emphasized, because
they instinctively felt that this was the means epic poetry must use to
accomplish its new duties; it was disorderly, because they did not quite
know what use these duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all the
splendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic poetry, as it were,
consciously dissatisfied--knowing that its future must achieve some
significance larger and deeper than anything it had yet done, and
knowing that this must be done somehow through imagined supernaturalism.
It waited nearly a hundred years for the poet who understood exactly
what was to be done and exactly how to do it.
In _Paradise Lost_, the development of epic poetry culminates, as far as
it has yet gone. The essential inspiration of the poem implies a
particular sense of human existence which has not yet definitely
appeared in the epic series, but which the process of life in Europe
made it absolutely necessary that epic poetry should symbolize. In
Milton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest task
laid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task was
perhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not the
greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first." The epigram
might just as reasonably have been the other way round. But nothing
would be more unprofitable than a discussion in which Homer and Milton
compete for supremacy of genius. Our business here is quite otherwise.
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