From: Mairead Byrne <[log in to unmask]>
> If Elizabeth Barrett Browning was up on that trick, Aurora Leigh is an
epic:
> definitely a great-grandmother of my twentieth century broken epics.
> Mairead
There's also the epic in personae -- her husband's +The Ring and the Book+
And the epic as Verse Epistle -- Clough's +Amours de Voyage+.
But when does the shift from Epic as History to Epic as Personal Experience
/ Contemporary Experience come in? Wordsworth in +The Prelude(s)+? Or to
carry this really far back, George Gascoigne in the whole of +An Hundreth
Sundrie Flowers+, if it's considered as a totality.
Edwin Morgan has several comments on the difficulty of writing a
contemporary long poem, but I can't remember just where off-hand. And
there's his own solution to the problem, the Epic As Sequence in +The New
Divan+ and +Sonnets From Scotland+ (or even going back to +The Whitrick+ or
(even further back) +The Cape of Good Hope+ -- it seems to be one of the
(several) constant preoccupations in his work.
The closest I've come to it myself is +The Golden Hive+, which takes up
about 20 pages in +The Lost Jockey+, "A Notebook for the Beautiful and the
Damned of this Present Age" (18), and +A Bardo of the Rock+ (only 8, but
meant to be a "single" text). But this is close to the (platitudinous) case
that any collection of poems conceived as a whole could be seen as a
fractured epic, so doesn't solve the problem of journal publication of long
poems as a whole. Maybe (as with EM) you have to wait till you're emeritous
enough to be allowed book publication -- but then, how many of the
nineteenth century "epics" were published in journals?
The Scottish magazine (now defunct) published by Duncan Glenn in the 60s/70s
did it, but no others, I think. But then, Duncan Glenn was into writing
epics himself, so would naturally be more sympathetic.
Robin
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