Has any among our ranks read-up on much of Old (with a emphatically capitalized "O") Epic Poetry, such as The Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer; or Dante's Inferno, by, well, Dante? These, I have found, hold great literarily aesthetic content, and have some good, Biblical morals that can be taken away from them. Anyone familiar with these pieces?

I've never read Dante's Inferno but I do read "Epic poetry"
Some favorites would be Beowulf, The Kalevala, and the Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.

I'm pretty sure The Canterbury tales are not poetry. I've read very few of them as most are not fit to read.

If its biblical morals your looking for I suggest such epic poetry as Job, Song of Solomon or Psalms. (though Hebrew poetry loses a lot in translation.)

Beowulf is fantastic!!! I loved it:) I hold some familiarity with Sigurd, not much though; I'll have to look those up:)


Being completely constituted by rhyming couplets, and written in full meter, I believe it would be considered as poetry. Especially considering Chaucer being known as the "Father of Modern Poetry," by doing things like creating iambic pentameter, such as in The CT's, which was then used by Shakespeare, et cetera.
Also, I, having read the good majority, found the Canterbury Tales to be made up of the king's English language, which is readable enough for me



Some of the psalms are beautiful! Written at times in chiasmus and such, totally stunning! Job as well

Your right about the Canterbury tales being poetry. I didn't know that as the selected stories I read were not in verse. (they were retellings.)

I actually meant that most were unfit to read because of content not style or story. (though the original spelling is enough to drive a modern mad.)

The Iliad is another i liked and I've read various parts of the Poetic Edda.
Other than that All I can think of are more modern "Epic poets" such as Walter Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow and of coarse my favorite Tolkien (The Lay of Leithian, and Sir Orfeo to name a few.)

I ... wouldn't put either the Canterbury Tales or anything by Dante in the category of "epic poetry." Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Norse sagas are what define the genre for me: long story-poems dealing with "the stuff of myth" that were either (in the original sense of the term) composed orally rather than being "written" or (by extension, so as to include, for example, the Aeneid) in the same tradition and along the same lines as the orally-transmitted poems.

This is not to say anything against Dante; I highly recommend reading the entire Divine Comedy (not just the Inferno!). But Dante was writing poetry to be read, not told, and for all that his "dream vision" takes him through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and that his guide for the first third is the epic poet Virgil, I don't think his "material" fits the "epic" genre either.

Ooh! I seemed to have committed a fallacy of conjunction! Canterbury Tales is not an epic, however it is mostly written in rhyming verse, which makes it somewhere around a poem!
However, I will say that -strictly speaking- The Divine Comedy and such is most definitely an epic poem by all standards of the objective term.


Hehe, I was meaning the entirety of Dante's pieces, not simply the one part Sorry, hah.

You are very correct in saying that his poetry was to be told! I would hate to attend any convention of humans that would read aloud the entirety of his works, lo' that would be a painful process. So I am glad no one figured his works for the reading.
But I would say it would fit the literary terms of "A long narrative poem written in elevated style, in which heroes of great historical or legendary importance perform valorous deeds. The setting is vast in scope, covering great nations, the world, or the universe, and the action is important to the history of a nation or people."

Vergil really does not trifle in this matter, so I will not pay him any undue remark, other than to say translating his Latin is a meticulous and painful process.

I see the distinction I was trying to make didn't come across clearly, so let me make an analogy from music. Before the development of music notation, everyone who wrote music did so entirely by ear on their instrument(s), and this music was transmitted from instrument to instrument by ear. I would call that music, and music that is clearly in the same tradition (since many people still "write" tunes by taking up an instrument and playing, then writing the tune down to share with others), "folk music." But after the development of music notation, there are other lines of development in musical history; Baroque counterpoint and Classical symphonies were clearly not composed or intended to be taught entirely by ear.

Similarly, the original epic poems were composed before the development of writing. And while more recent epic poets (from Virgil on) have written rather than merely told their poems, it's usually clear whether any given poem is in the same tradition or not.

While the definition you cite isn't quite what I would have put together, I think that the Divine Comedy clearly doesn't fit almost any part of that definition.

Granted.

I don't think so, but I'm not enough of an expert to say conclusively, so I'll concede that it may be.

Decidedly not! If you count the apostles as "heroes of great historical or legendary importance" you could get the subject of that clause into the Comedy, but there are no "valorous deeds" whatsoever!

The setting is Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, which he indeed depicts as vast, but not as any of those alternatives the definition cites.

Assuming that this refers to the intention of the poet rather than to the judgment of history, the Comedy again does not even remotely fit this. In fact, there's essentially no 'action" at all: in form it's a travelogue describing the places the poet is guided through.

To each his own

We could all argue all day on what each of us consider "Epic poetry" (and i'm not really that familiar with was the guidelines are supposed to be anyway.)

To me the guidelines of epic poetry are simply that they have be be in verse, narrative, and long. These seem to be the only things that make them epic to me.
Though reading around on the internet (which also seems to disagree with it's self their seems to be a consensus that it has to be written about the "heroic era" of a culture and to have an oral tradition.