Reinventing heroism: the epic poem in English

Spenser and Milton, each in a strikingly different way and in very different historical circumstances, set out to achieve in English what Homer had done in Greek and Virgil in Latin. Each adapts an ancient generic form to up-to-date purposes, with the declared aim of inspiring his contemporaries to a particular vision of the actively virtuous life. We will look closely together at the nature of those adaptations, and at the vision of heroism that each poem presents.

In our first class, by looking at Spenser’s and Milton’s own accounts of their intentions in producing an epic poem, we will see why the epic genre was so important in the 16th and 17th centuries and what its essential qualities were considered to be; then we will consider how each set out to adapt those qualities to English verse and to current cultural conditions. In subsequent classes we will look more extensively at how each poet in turn uses his epic narrative to delineate a contrast between two fundamentally different ideas of heroism, in order powerfully to draw a distinction between true and false notions of virtue. For both poets, it turns out that the true hero is also the true Christian — but each presents a remarkably different vision of what true Christian heroism consists in.