]
[Footnote 12: "All that is known, all that is felt, is God."]
V.
AFTER MILTON
And after Milton, what is to happen? First, briefly, for a few instances
of what has happened. We may leave out experiments in religious
sentiment like Klopstock's _Messiah_. We must leave out also poems which
have something of the look of epic at first glance, but have nothing of
the scope of epic intention; such as Scott's longer poems. These might
resemble the "lays" out of which some people imagine "authentic" epic to
have been made. But the lays are not the epic. Scott's poems have not
the depth nor the definiteness of symbolic intention--what is sometimes
called the epic unity--and this is what we can always discover in any
poetry which gives us the peculiar experience we must associate with the
word epic, if it is to have any precision of meaning. What applies to
Scott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of the
greatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. We
must keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_ has
something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality
of human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's
_Hyperion_ is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us form
any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose.[13] Our search
will not take us far before we notice something very remarkable; poems
which look superficially like epic turn out to have scarce anything of
real epic intention; whereas epic intention is apt to appear in poems
that do not look like epic at all.
Pages:
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84