LITERATURE SCOPE and TYPES

                              literature

  a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject matter.

                               The scope of literature

Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words—even when organized and written down—is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily informative—technical, scholarly, journalistic—would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.
The purest (or, at least, the most intense) literary form is the lyric poem, and after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository verse. Most theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry, because the aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but verse. Many novels—certainly all the world's great novels—are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the Chinese, possessors of one of the world's greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few exceptions, to possess no literary merit whatsoever).
The Greeks thought of history as one of the seven arts, inspired by a goddess, the muse Clio. All of the world's classic surveys of history can stand as noble examples of the art of literature, but most historical works and studies today are not written primarily with literary excellence in mind, though they may possess it, as it were, by accident.
The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature: its subject matter was of comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written as expository, informative journalism, although there are still essayists in the great tradition who think of themselves as artists. Now, as in the past, some of the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the arts.
Some personal documents (autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters) rank among the world's greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly polished literary style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win their standing as literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope.
Many works of philosophy are classed as literature. The Dialogues of Plato (4th century BC) are written with great narrative skill and in the finest prose; the Meditations of the 2nd-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and the Greek in which they are written is eccentric. Yet both are classed as literature, while the speculations of other philosophers, ancient and modern, are not. Certain scientific works endure as literature long after their scientific content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of natural history, where the element of personal observation is of special importance. An excellent example is Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789).
Oratory, the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The oratory of the American Indian, for instance, is famous, while in Classical Greece, Polymnia was the muse sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome's great orator Cicero was to have a decisive influence on the development of English prose style. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is known to every American schoolchild. Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a craft than as an art. Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting, purely commercial fiction, or cinema and television scripts as accepted forms of literary expression, although others would hotly dispute their exclusion. The test in individual cases would seem to be one of enduring satisfaction and, of course, truth. Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to categorize literature, for in modern civilization words are everywhere. Man is subject to a continuous flood of communication. Most of it is fugitive, but here and there—in high-level journalism, in television, in the cinema, in commercial fiction, in westerns and detective stories, and in plain, expository prose—some writing, almost by accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance that entitle it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.

                                                     TYPES OF LITERATURE

poetry

literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly—under some definitions—the primal and primary form of languages themselves. The present article means only to describe in as general a way as possible certain properties of poetry and of poetic thought regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind. Naturally, not every tradition nor every local or individual variation can be—or need be—included, but the article illustrates by examples of poetry ranging between nursery rhyme and epic. This article considers the difficulty or impossibility of defining poetry; man's nevertheless familiar acquaintance with it; the differences between poetry and prose; the idea of form in poetry; poetry as a mode of thought; and what little may be said in prose of the spirit of poetry.

                                                     TYPES OF POETRY

Poetry

The Norman Conquest worked no immediate transformation on either the language or the literature of the English. Older poetry continued to be copied during the last half of the 11th century; two poems of the early 12th century— "Durham," which praises that city's cathedral and its relics, and "Instructions for Christians," a didactic piece—show that correct alliterative verse could be composed well after 1066. But even before the conquest, rhyme had begun to supplant rather than supplement alliteration in some poems, which continued to use the older four-stress line, although their rhythms varied from the set types used in classical Old English verse. A postconquest example is "The Grave," which contains several rhyming lines; a poem from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the death of William the Conqueror, lamenting his cruelty and greed, has more rhyme than alliteration.

Influence of French poetry

By the end of the 12th century, English poetry had been so heavily influenced by French models that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by Lawamon, a Worcestershire priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with rhyming couplets while generally eschewing French vocabulary. The Brut draws mainly upon Wace's Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut (1155; based in turn upon Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain]), but in Lawamon's hands the Arthurian story takes on a Germanic and heroic flavour largely missing in Wace. The Brut exists in two manuscripts, one written shortly after 1200 and the other some 50 years later. That the later version has been extensively modernized and somewhat abridged suggests the speed with which English language and literary tastes were changing in this period. The Proverbs of Alfred was written somewhat earlier, in the late 12th century; these proverbs deliver conventional wisdom in a mixture of rhymed couplets and alliterative lines, and it is hardly likely that any of the material they contain actually originated with the king whose wisdom they celebrate. The early 13th-century Bestiary mixes alliterative lines, three- and four-stress couplets, and septenary (heptameter) lines, but the logic behind this mix is more obvious than in the Brut and the Proverbs, for the poet was imitating the varied metres of his Latin source. More regular in form than these poems is the anonymous Poema morale in septenary couplets, in which an old man delivers a dose of moral advice to his presumably younger audience.
By far the most brilliant poem of this period is The Owl and the Nightingale (written after 1189), an example of the popular debate genre. The two birds argue topics ranging from their hygienic habits, looks, and songs to marriage, prognostication, and the proper modes of worship. The nightingale stands for the joyous aspects of life, the owl for the sombre; there is no clear winner, but the debate ends as the birds go off to state their cases to one Nicholas of Guildford, a wise man. The poem is learned in the clerical tradition but wears its learning lightly as the disputants speak in colloquial and sometimes earthy language. Like the Poema morale, The Owl and the Nightingale is metrically regular (octosyllabic couplets), but it uses the French metre with an assurance unusual in so early a poem.

Didactic poetry

The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems presenting biblical narrative, saints' lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French. The most idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum by Orm, an Augustinian canon in the north of England. Written in some 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets, the work is interesting mainly in that the manuscript that preserves it is Orm's autograph and shows his somewhat fussy efforts to reform and regularize English spelling. Other biblical paraphrases are Genesis and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph, and the vast Cursor mundi, whose subject, as its title suggests, is the history of the world. An especially popular work was the South English Legendary, which began as a miscellaneous collection of saints' lives but was expanded by later redactors and rearranged in the order of the church calendar. The didactic tradition continued into the 14th century with Robert Mannyng's Handling Sin, a confessional manual whose expected dryness is relieved by the insertion of lively narratives, and the Prick of Conscience, a popular summary of theology sometimes attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle.

Verse romance

The earliest examples of verse romance, a genre that would remain popular through the Middle Ages, appeared in the 13th century. King Horn and Floris and Blauncheflour both are preserved in a manuscript of about 1250. King Horn, oddly written in short two- and three-stress lines, is a vigorous tale of a kingdom lost and regained, with a subplot concerning Horn's love for Princess Rymenhild. Floris and Blauncheflour is more exotic, being the tale of a pair of royal lovers who become separated and, after various adventures in eastern lands, reunited. Not much later than these is The Lay of Havelok the Dane, a tale of princely love and adventure similar to King Horn but more competently executed. Many more such romances were produced in the 14th century. Popular subgenres were “the matter of Britain” (Arthurian romances such as Of Arthour and of Merlin and Ywain and Gawain), “the matter of Troy” (tales of antiquity such as The Siege of Troy and King Alisaunder), and the English Breton lays (stories of otherworldly magic, such as Lai le Freine and Sir Orfeo, modeled after those of professional Breton storytellers). These relatively unsophisticated works were written for a bourgeois audience, and the manuscripts that preserve them are early examples of commercial book production. The humorous beast epic makes its first appearance in Britain in the 13th century with The Fox and the Wolf, taken indirectly from the Old French Roman de Renart. In the same manuscript with this work is Dame Sirith, the earliest English fabliau. Another sort of humour is found in The Land of Cockaygne, which depicts a utopia better than heaven, where rivers run with milk, honey, and wine, geese fly about already roasted, and monks hunt with hawks and dance with nuns.

The lyric

The lyric was virtually unknown to Old English poets. Poems such as "Deor" and "Wulf and Eadwacer," which have been called lyrics, are thematically different from those that began to circulate orally in the 12th century and to be written down in great numbers in the 13th; these Old English poems also have a stronger narrative component than the later productions. The most frequent topics in the Middle English secular lyric are springtime and romantic love; many rework such themes tediously, but some, such as "Foweles in the frith" (13th century) and "Ich am of Irlaunde" (14th century), convey strong emotions in a few lines. Two lyrics of the early 13th century, "Mirie it is while sumer ilast" and "Sumer is icumen in," are preserved with musical settings, and probably most of the others were meant to be sung. The dominant mood of the religious lyrics is passionate: the poets sorrow for Christ on the cross and for the Virgin Mary, celebrate the “five joys” of Mary, and import language from love poetry to express religious devotion. Excellent early examples are "Nou goth sonne under wod" and "Stond wel, moder, ounder rode." Many of the lyrics are preserved in manuscript anthologies, of which the best is British Library manuscript Harley 2253 from the early 14th century. In this collection, known as the Harley Lyrics, the love poems, such as "Alysoun" and "Blow, Northern Wind," take after the poems of the Provençal troubadours but are less formal, less abstract, and more lively. The religious lyrics also are of high quality; but the most remarkable of the Harley Lyrics, "The Man in the Moon," far from being about love or religion, imagines the man in the Moon as a simple peasant, sympathizes with his hard life, and offers him some useful advice on how to best the village hayward (a local officer in charge of a town's common herd of cattle).
A poem such as "The Man in the Moon" serves as a reminder that, although the poetry of the early Middle English period was increasingly influenced by the Anglo-Norman literature produced for the courts, it is seldom “courtly.” Most English poets, whether writing about kings or peasants, looked at life from a bourgeois perspective. If their work sometimes lacks sophistication, it nevertheless has a vitality that comes from preoccupation with daily affairs.

 Sonnet

fixed verse form of Italian origin consisting of 14 lines that are typically five-foot iambics rhyming according to a prescribed scheme.

The sonnet is unique among poetic forms in Western literature in that it has retained its appeal for major poets for five centuries. The form seems to have originated in the 13th century among the Sicilian school of court poets, who were influenced by the love poetry of Provençal troubadours. From there it spread to Tuscany, where it reached its highest expression in the 14th century in the poems of Petrarch. His Canzoniere—a sequence of poems including 317 sonnets, addressed to his idealized beloved, Laura—established and perfected the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, which remains one of the two principal sonnet forms, as well as the one most widely used. The other major form is the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet.
The Petrarchan sonnet characteristically treats its theme in two parts. The first eight lines, the octave, state a problem, ask a question, or express an emotional tension. The last six lines, the sestet, resolve the problem, answer the question, or relieve the tension. The octave is rhymed abbaabba. The rhyme scheme of the sestet varies; it may be cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The Petrarchan sonnet became a major influence on European poetry. It soon became naturalized in Spain, Portugal, and France and was introduced to Poland, whence it spread to other Slavic literatures. In most cases the form was adapted to the staple metre of the language—e.g., the alexandrine (12-syllable iambic line) in France and iambic pentameter in English.
The sonnet was introduced to England, along with other Italian verse forms, by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in the 16th century. The new forms precipitated the great Elizabethan flowering of lyric poetry, and the period marks the peak of the sonnet's English popularity. In the course of adapting the Italian form to a language less rich in rhymes, the Elizabethans gradually arrived at the distinctive English sonnet, which is composed of three quatrains, each having an independent rhyme scheme, and is ended with a rhymed couplet.
The rhyme scheme of the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. Its greater number of rhymes makes it a less demanding form than the Petrarchan sonnet, but this is offset by the difficulty presented by the couplet, which must summarize the impact of the preceding quatrains with the compressed force of a Greek epigram. An example is Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
Oh, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The typical Elizabethan use of the sonnet was in a sequence of love poems in the manner of Petrarch. Although each sonnet was an independent poem, partly conventional in content and partly self-revelatory, the sequence had the added interest of providing something of a narrative development. Among the notable Elizabethan sequences are Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591), Samuel Daniel's Delia (1592), Michael Drayton's Idea's Mirrour (1594), and Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1591). The last-named work uses a common variant of the sonnet (known as Spenserian) that follows the English quatrain and couplet pattern but resembles the Italian in using a linked rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Perhaps the greatest of all sonnet sequences is Shakespeare's, addressed to a young man and a “dark lady.” In these sonnets the supposed love story is of less interest than the underlying reflections on time and art, growth and decay, and fame and fortune.
In its subsequent development the sonnet was to depart even further from themes of love. By the time John Donne wrote his religious sonnets (c. 1610) and Milton wrote sonnets on political and religious subjects or on personal themes such as his blindness (i.e., “When I consider how my light is spent”), the sonnet had been extended to embrace nearly all the subjects of poetry.
It is the virtue of this short form that it can range from “light conceits of lovers” to considerations of life, time, death, and eternity, without doing injustice to any of them. Even during the Romantic era, in spite of the emphasis on freedom and spontaneity, the sonnet forms continued to challenge major poets. Many English writers—including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—continued to write Petrarchan sonnets. One of the best-known examples of this in English is Wordsworth's “The World Is Too Much With Us”:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me
less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

In the later 19th century the love sonnet sequence was revived by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The House of Life (1876). The most distinguished 20th-century work of the kind is Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnette an Orpheus (1922).

BALLED

short narrative folk song whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have little affected the habit of folk singing.

France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Spain, as well as England and Scotland, possess impressive ballad collections. At least one-third of the 300 extant English and Scottish ballads have counterparts in one or several of these continental balladries, particularly those of Scandinavia. In no two language areas, however, are the formal characteristics of the ballad identical. For example, British and American ballads are invariably rhymed and strophic (i.e., divided into stanzas); the Russian ballads known as byliny and almost all Balkan ballads are unrhymed and unstrophic; and, though the romances of Spain, as their ballads are called, and the Danish viser are alike in using assonance instead of rhyme, the Spanish ballads are generally unstrophic while the Danish are strophic, parcelled into either quatrains or couplets.
In reception, however, the ballad's technique and form are often subordinated to its presentation of events—especially ones presented as historical, whether factually accurate or not—and their significance to the audience. The ballad also plays a critical role in the creation and maintenance of distinct national cultures. In contemporary literature and music, the ballad is primarily defined by its commitment to nostalgia, community histories, and romantic love.

Ode

ceremonious poem on an occasion of public or private dignity in which personal emotion and general meditation are united. The Greek word ōdē, which has been accepted in most modern European languages, meant a choric song, usually accompanied by a dance. Alcman (7th century BC) originated the strophic arrangement of the ode, which is a rhythmic system composed of two or more lines repeated as a unit; and Stesichorus (7th–6th centuries BC) invented the triadic, or three-part, structure (strophic lines followed by antistrophic lines in the same metre, concluding with a summary line, called an epode, in a different metre) that characterizes the odes of Pindar and Bacchylides. Choral odes were also an integral part of the Greek drama. In Latin the word was not used until about the time of Horace, in the 1st century BC. His carmina (“songs”), written in stanzas of two or four lines of polished Greek metres, are now universally called odes, although the implication that they were to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre is probably only a literary convention. Both Pindaric and Horatian ode forms were revived during the Renaissance and continued to influence lyric poetry into the 20th century. The first version of Allen Tate's widely acclaimed “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” for example, was published in 1926.

In pre-Islāmic Arabic poetry, the ode flourished in the form of the qaṣīdah. Two great collections date from the 8th and 9th centuries. The qaṣīdah was also used in Persian poetry for panegyric and elegies in the 10th century, gradually being replaced by the shorter ghazal for bacchic odes and love poetry. In the hands of Indian poets from the 14th century onward, Persian forms became increasingly obscure and artificial.

Pindaric ode-

ceremonious poem by or in the manner of Pindar, a Greek professional lyrist of the 5th century BC. Pindar employed the triadic structure attributed to Stesichorus (7th and 6th centuries BC), consisting of a strophe (two or more lines repeated as a unit) followed by a metrically harmonious antistrophe, concluding with a summary line (called an epode) in a different metre. These three parts corresponded to the movement of the chorus to one side of the stage, then to the other, and their pause midstage to deliver the epode.

Although fragments of Pindar's poems in all of the Classical choral forms are extant, it is the collection of four books of epinician odes that has influenced poets of the Western world since their publication by Aldus Manutius in 1513. Each of the books is devoted to one of the great series of Greek Classical games: the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean. Celebrating the victory of a winner with a performance of choral chant and dance, these epinician odes are elaborately complex, rich in metaphor and intensely emotive language. They reveal Pindar's sense of vocation as a poet dedicated to preserving and interpreting great deeds and their divine values. The metaphors, myths, and gnomic sayings that ornament the odes are often difficult to grasp because of the rapid shifts of thought and the sacrifice of syntax to achieving uniform poetic colour. For modern readers, another difficulty is the topicality of the works; they were often composed for particular occasions and made reference to events and personal situations that were well-known to the original audience but not necessarily to later readers.
With the publication of Pierre de Ronsard's four books of French Odes (1550), the Pindaric ode was adapted to the vernacular languages. Imitation Pindaric odes were written in England by Thomas Gray in 1757, “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard.” Abraham Cowley's Pindarique Odes (1656) introduced a looser version known as Pindarics. These are irregular rhymed odes in which the length of line and stanza is capriciously varied to suggest, but not reproduce, the style and manner of Pindar. These spurious Pindarics are some of the greatest odes in the English language, including John Dryden's “Alexander's Feast” (1697), William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson's “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” and John Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Horatian ode-

short lyric poem written in stanzas of two or four lines in the manner of the 1st-century-BC Latin poet Horace. In contrast to the lofty, heroic odes of the Greek poet Pindar (compare epinicion), most of Horace's odes are intimate and reflective; they are often addressed to a friend and deal with friendship, love, and the practice of poetry.

Horace introduced early Greek lyrics into Latin by adapting Greek metres, regularizing them, and writing his Romanized versions with a discipline that caused some loss of spontaneity and a sense of detachment but produced elegance and dignity. But he cautioned Latin writers not to attempt to emulate Pindar, a task that he likened to Icarus' presumptuous flight. Horace's carmina, written in stanzas of two or four lines, are now universally called odes, but they have nothing in common with the passionate brilliance of Pindaric odes. Horace's tone is generally serious and serene, often touched with irony and melancholy but sometimes with gentle humour. His urbane Epicureanism and personal charm, his aphoristic philosophy and studied perfection won him recognition as Rome's leading poet after the death of his friend Virgil.
In later periods when technical felicity was more highly regarded than imagination and spontaneity, Horace's odes were prized and imitated. Among the poets of the Pléiade in 16th-century France, Pierre de Ronsard attempted to model his first odes on Pindar. Defeated, he contented himself with being, in his opinion, better than Horace. Nicolas Boileau and Jean de La Fontaine in the 17th century preserved the Horatian tradition.
Michael Drayton, in Poems Lyric and Pastoral (1606), acknowledged his indebtedness to Horace, and Andrew Marvell produced one of the finest English Horatian odes in 1650 on Cromwell's return from Ireland. In the early 18th century, Matthew Prior, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson revived the Horatian spirit, as did Giacomo Leopardi and Giosuè Carducci in Italy in the 19th century. Since the odes of the Romantic period, which were successful imitations of the manner but not the form of Pindar, few English poets have attempted to return to the classical forms.

Irregular Ode-

a rhymed ode that employs neither the three-part form of the Pindaric ode nor the two- or four-line stanza that typifies the Horatian ode. It is also characterized by irregularity of verse and stanzaic structure and by lack of correspondence between parts called pseudo-Pindaric ode or Cowleyan ode (after Abraham Cowley).

Dramatic Monologue-

a poem written in the form of a speech of an individual character; it compresses into a single vivid scene a narrative sense of the speaker's history and psychological insight into his character. Though the form is chiefly associated with Robert Browning, who raised it to a highly sophisticated level in such poems as “My Last Duchess,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “Andrea del Sarto,” it is actually much older. Many Old English poems are dramatic monologues—for instance, “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.” The form is also common in folk ballads, a tradition that Robert Burns imitated with broad satiric effect in “Holy Willie's Prayer.” Browning's contribution to the form is one of subtlety of characterization and complexity of the dramatic situation, which the reader gradually pieces together from the casual remarks or digressions of the speaker. The subject discussed is usually far less interesting than what is inadvertently revealed about the speaker himself. In “My Last Duchess,” in showing off a painting of his late wife, an Italian aristocrat reveals his cruelty to her. The form parallels the novelistic experiments with point of view in which the reader is left to assess the intelligence and reliability of the narrator. Later poets who successfully used the form were Ezra Pound (“The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter”), T.S. Eliot (“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), and Robert Frost (“The Pauper Witch of Grafton”).

Epic-

long narrative poem recounting heroic deeds, although the term has also been loosely used to describe novels, such as Tolstoy's War and Peace, and motion pictures, such as Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. In literary usage, the term encompasses both oral and written compositions. The prime examples of the oral epic are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Outstanding examples of the written epic include Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's Pharsalia in Latin; Chanson de Roland in medieval French; Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata in Italian; Poema (or Cantar) de mio Cid in Spanish; and Milton's Paradise Lost and Spenser's Faerie Queene in English. There are also seriocomic epics, such as the Morgante of a 15th-century Italian poet, Pulci, and the pseudo-Homeric Battle of the Frogs and Mice. Another distinct group is made up of the so-called beast epics—narrative poems written in Latin in the Middle Ages and dealing with the struggle between a cunning fox and a cruel and stupid wolf. Underlying all of the written forms is some trace of an oral character, partly because of the monumental persuasiveness of Homer's example but more largely because the epic was, in fact, born of an oral tradition. It is on the oral tradition of the epic form that this article will focus.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EPIC-
 
An epic may deal with such various subjects as myths, heroic legends, histories, edifying religious tales, animal stories, or philosophical or moral theories. Epic poetry has been used by peoples all over the world and in different ages to transmit their traditions from one generation to another, without the aid of writing. These traditions frequently consist of legendary narratives about the glorious deeds of their national heroes. Thus scholars have often identified “epic” with a certain kind of heroic oral poetry, which comes into existence in so-called heroic ages. Such ages have been experienced by many nations, usually at a stage of development in which they have had to struggle for a national identity. This effort, combined with such other conditions as an adequate material culture and a sufficiently productive economy, tend to produce a society dominated by a powerful and warlike nobility, constantly occupied with martial activities, whose individual members seek, above all, everlasting fame for themselves and for their lineages.

Uses of the epic

The main function of poetry in heroic-age society appears to be to stir the spirit of the warriors to heroic actions by praising their exploits and those of their illustrious ancestors, by assuring a long and glorious recollection of their fame, and by supplying them with models of ideal heroic behaviour. One of the favorite pastimes of the nobility in heroic ages in different times and places has been to gather in banquet halls to hear heroic songs, in praise of famous deeds sung by professional singers as well as by the warriors themselves. Heroic songs also were often sung before a battle, and such recitations had tremendous effect on the morale of the combatants. Among the Fulani (Fulbe) people in The Sudan, for instance, whose epic poetry has been recorded, a nobleman customarily set out in quest of adventures accompanied by a singer (mabo), who also served as his shield bearer. The singer was thus the witness of the heroic deeds of his lord, which he celebrated in an epic poem called baudi.
The aristocratic warriors of the heroic ages were thus members of an illustrious family, a link in a long chain of glorious heroes. And the chain could snap if the warrior failed to preserve the honour of the family, whereas, by earning fame through his own heroism, he could give it new lustre. Epic traditions were to a large extent the traditions of the aristocratic families: the Old French word geste, used for a form of epic that flourished in the Middle Ages, means not only a story of famous deeds but also a genealogy.
The passing of a heroic age does not necessarily mean the end of its heroic oral poetry. An oral epic tradition usually continues for as long as the nation remains largely illiterate. Usually it is after the heroic age has passed that the narratives about its legendary heroes are fully elaborated. Even when the nobility that originally created the heroic epic perishes or loses interest, the old songs can persist as entertainments among the people. Court singers, then, are replaced by popular singers, who recite at public gatherings. This popular tradition, however, must be distinguished from a tradition that still forms an integral part of the culture of a nobility. For when a heroic epic loses its contact with the banquet halls of the princes and noblemen, it cannot preserve for long its power of renewal. Soon it enters what has been called the reproductive stage in the life cycle of an oral tradition, in which the bards become noncreative reproducers of songs learned from older singers. Popular oral singers, like the guslari of the Balkans, no doubt vary their songs to a certain extent each time they recite them, but they do so mainly by transposing language and minor episodes from one acquired song to another. Such variations must not be confounded with the real enrichment of the tradition by succeeding generations of genuine oral poets of the creative stage. The spread of literacy, which has a disastrous effect on the oral singer, brings about a quick corruption of the tradition. At this degenerate stage, the oral epic soon dies out if it is not written down or recorded.
The ancient Greek epic exemplifies the cycle of an oral tradition. Originating in the late Mycenaean period, the Greek epic outlasted the downfall of the typically heroic-age culture (c. 1100 BC) and maintained itself through the “Dark Age” to reach a climax in the Homeric poems by the close of the Geometric period (900–750 BC). After Homer, the activity of the aoidoi, who sang their own epic songs at the courts of the nobility, slowly declined. During the first half of the 7th century, the aoidoi produced such new poems as those of Hesiod and some of the earlier poems of what was to become known as the Epic Cycle. Between 625 and 575 BC the aoidoi gave way to oral reciters of a new type, called rhapsodes or “stitchers of songs,” who declaimed for large audiences the already famous works of Homer while holding in their hand a staff (rhabdos), which they used to give emphasis to their words. It seems probable that these rhapsodes, who played a crucial role in the transmission of the Homeric epic, were using some sort of written aids to memory before Homeric recitations were adopted in 6th-century Athens as part of the Panathenaic festivals held each year in honour of the goddess Athena.

Mock-Epic (MOCK-HEROIC EPIC)-

form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule contemporary “ancients” (classicists). More often it was used by “ancients” to point up the unheroic character of the modern age by subjecting thinly disguised contemporary events to a heroic treatment. The classic example of this is Nicolas Boileau's Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”), which begins with a quarrel between two ecclesiastical dignitaries about where to place a lectern in a chapel and ends with a battle in a bookstore in which champions of either side hurl their favourite “ancient” or “modern” authors at each other. Jonathan Swift's “Battle of the Books” (1704) is a variation of this theme in mock-heroic prose. The outstanding English mock-epic is Alexander Pope's brilliant tour de force The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), which concerns a society beau's theft of a lock of hair from a society belle; Pope treated the incident as if it were comparable to events that sparked the Trojan War.

Most mock-epics begin with an invocation to the muse and use the familiar epic devices of set speeches, supernatural interventions, and descents to the underworld, as well as infinitely detailed descriptions of the protagonist's activities. Thus, they provide much scope for display of the author's ingenuity and inventiveness. An American mock-epic, Joel Barlow's The Hasty Pudding (written 1793), celebrates in three 400-line cantos his favourite New England dish, cornmeal mush.

Elegy-

meditative lyric poem lamenting the death of a public personage or of a friend or loved one; by extension, any reflective lyric on the broader theme of human mortality. In classical literature an elegy was simply any poem written in the elegiac metre (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter) and was not restricted as to subject. Though some classical elegies were laments, many others were love poems. In some modern literatures, such as German, in which the classical elegiac metre has been adapted to the language, the term elegy refers to this metre, rather than to the poem's content. Thus, Rainer Maria Rilke's famous Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) are not laments; they deal with the poet's search for spiritual values in an alien universe. But in English literature since the 16th century, an elegy has come to mean a poem of lamentation. It may be written in any metre the poet chooses.

A distinct kind of elegy is the pastoral elegy, which borrows the classical convention of representing its subject as an idealized shepherd in an idealized pastoral background and follows a rather formal pattern. It begins with an expression of grief and an invocation to the Muse to aid the poet in expressing his suffering. It usually contains a funeral procession, a description of sympathetic mourning throughout nature, and musings on the unkindness of death. It ends with acceptance, often a very affirmative justification, of nature's law. The outstanding example of the English pastoral elegy is John Milton's “Lycidas” (1638), written on the death of Edward King, a college friend. Other notable pastoral elegies are Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Adonais” (1821), on the death of the poet John Keats, and Matthew Arnold's “Thyrsis” (1867), on the death of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
Other elegies observe no set patterns or conventions. In the 18th century the English “graveyard school” of poets wrote generalized reflections on death and immortality, combining gloomy, sometimes ghoulish imagery of human impermanence with philosophical speculation.
Representative works are Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–45) and Robert Blair's Grave (1743), but the best known of these poems is Thomas Gray's more tastefully subdued creation “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), which pays tribute to the generations of humble and unknown villagers buried in a church cemetery. In the United States, a counterpart to the graveyard mode is found in William Cullen Bryant's “Thanatopsis” (1817). A wholly new treatment of the conventional pathetic fallacy of attributing grief to nature is achieved in Walt Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” (1865–66).
In modern poetry the elegy remains a frequent and important poetic statement. Its range and variation can be seen in such poems as A.E. Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young,” W.H. Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” E.E. Cummings's “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale Bishop's “Hours” (on F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Robert Lowell's “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.”