This chapter addresses the relationship between Shelley’s epic theory and practice with reference notably to Laon and Cythna and “A Defence of Poetry”, as well as Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. The essay shows how Laon and Cythna breaks with epic tradition – and exceeds Shelley’s own theoretical account of the genre – in finding creative solutions to the problem of how to link past, present, and future, as well as the local and the universal, without didacticism or what Shelley in the ‘Defence’ calls the ‘gross’ sense of prophecy: a foretelling of the future. I contend that Shelley’s epic poetry does not seek to recuperate past moments of social coherence to guide and unify the present or predict the future so much as to leave space for not knowing what will come. Shelley’s experimental epics regard a hopeful uncertainty as, paradoxically, the only certain means of reform.

This chapter provides a short history of folklore collection and an overview of the genres privileged by Russian folklorists. In the early 1800s, folklorists began writing down, editing, and publishing creative oral performance, primarily that of peasants, because it was thought that these performances reflected ancient traditions that had been passed down for centuries. In the course of transforming oral culture into print collections, genres were identified and codified. The epic (bylina) and the fairytale (skazka) were among the genres most prioritised. Their particular formal features served to anchor a diverse genre system that included historical songs, religious verses, legends, and mythological stories. The chapter identifies characteristic events and stock characters, as well as features of style, structure, and performance typical of these genres of narrative folklore. It concludes by commenting on the reciprocal relationship between folklore and literature.

The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.

Lucian is an author inextricably connected to prose. In this chapter, I argue that poetry is a crucial and overlooked aspect of his literary identity. After an initial account of the striking presence of poetry in Lucian’s oeuvre and in wider Second Sophistic intellectual production, which operates beneath and beyond statements of disdain and disavowal, I turn to a close examination of three very different pieces of Lucian’s verse writing – from remixed tragic and epic ‘quotations’ in the Menippus and Zeus Tragoedus, to the ghostly new Homeric compositions in the True Histories – and highlight some key features of a Lucianic poetics. I ultimately suggest how this poetics articulates Lucian’s wider approach to the literary tradition, and his perception of his own role in continuing it. Lucian’s new-old verse provides him with a self-constructed mandate to reanimate the genres and conventions of the inherited past, to deflate them, disrupt them, and ultimately repossess them.

How much continuity was there in the allusive practices of the ancient world? This chapter explores this question here by considering the early Greek precedent for the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device often regarded as one of the most learned and bookish in a Roman poet’s allusive arsenal. Ever since Stephen Hinds opened his foundational Allusion and Intertext with this device, it has been considered the preserve of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets. This chapter, however, argues that we should back-date the phenomenon all the way to the archaic age. By considering a range of illustrative examples from epic (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod), lyric (Sappho, Pindar, Simonides), and tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides, Theodectes), it demonstrates that the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.

This chapter addresses the repeated appearances of the sublime in Clare’s verse – including his deployment of the word itself – as well as the ambivalent relationship Clare’s understanding and practice of the sublime has to eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetic discourse. This entails consideration of major theorizations of the sublime in the period prior to Clare and the reception in the English tradition of classical conceptions of literary sublimity or ‘grandeur’. The example of Milton is significant here, as is the genre of epic and Clare’s apparent aversion to it. A number of examples from Clare’s poetry and prose are considered in detail. The chapter concludes with a reading of Clare’s famous ‘I am’ poems, suggesting that they do in fact continue the tradition of Milton’s Satan, his resistance to oppression, and ambivalent insistence on the power of the mind.

This chapter examines how Pindar and Bacchylides make use of early epic (esp. Homer) in their victory odes, from an explicitly ’intertextualist’ perspective. It discusses (inter alia) the meaning of ’Homer’ in the fifth century BC to the earliest audiences of Pindar and Bacchylides and adverts to the complexity and multiplicity of the audiences of their victory odes. It argues furthermore for the critical importance and benefits of intertextual analysis of Pindar and Bacchylides, especially the ways in which interaction with texts such as those of archaic epic should prompt a wider openness to intertextual investigation of victory odes.

Chapter 3 explores the relationship of material and immaterial embodiments of animals in the Bronze Age Aegean, through the lion. Since populations of living lions were not present on Crete, representational embodiments were the basis of people’s physical encounters with the species; hence the peculiarities of these “object-bodies” powerfully contributed to the characterization of the beast. The vast majority of Cretan lion representations occurred in glyptic. Seals (as worn objects) and impressions (as material signifiers of identity) consistently placed the leonine in direct relation to the human, through bodily and sociocultural juxtapositions. Cretans also would have encountered lions in immaterial manifestations, through oral culture. Early Aegean poetic traditions formulated a paralleling of human and lion through similes that was remarkably similar to the paralleling juxtaposition generated between a lion-seal and person. In MBA III–LBA II, after centuries of development in Crete, the lion’s association with glyptic extended to the early Mycenaean mainland. This moment saw intense intra-Aegean exchange, with material, practical and linguistic dimensions. The epic tradition was taking form, including lion similes. Through its various embodiments, the lion was caught up in this interaction, as its Aegean juxtaposition with humans fluidly continued and developed.

With striking consistency Morris’s 1877 epic Sigurd meets the principal criteria of its genre. The poem makes its story the vehicle for conveying culturally definitive lore and values, and imbues its heroic actors with the aim of earning a place in that story. The first paginal opening of the 1898 Kelmscott edition embodies this consistency, in imagery and typography that constitute a bibliographical and prosodic rite of passage inducting the reader into a balance of fullness with order that typifies the whole. This aesthetic-ethical balance is then repeatedly thematized along the poem’s synchronic and diachronic axes: e.g., on one hand panoramic vistas, on the other hand sweeping narrative renditions of cosmology and prophecy; or the pivotal “house” figure, which doubles as doomed architectural structure and as tragically concatenated lineage. Morris’s epic moreover incorporates, among other constituent modes like pastoral and romance, the newly ascendant Victorian genre of domestic fiction, which, after dominating the story with the novel-like marital intrigue and foregrounded subjectivity of book 3, yields across the final book to the epic obsequies of Sigurd and Brynhild and the final conflagration of the royal palace at Gudrun’s implacably vindictive hand.

Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

This chapter provides an introduction to mediaeval Latin. After demonstrating the impossibility of providing any sort of meaningful survey of so extensive, varied and underexplored a literary field, I model two different ways of approaching the subject. One is through microhistory, where one looks at texts with certain generic, formal or geographic characteristics in a diachronic fashion from their classical ancestors to their Renaissance progeny always keeping in view contiguous material in other genres and in languages other than Latin. The other is the history of style, where one looks synchronically at texts produced in widely different regions and in different generic categories to obtain a broader vista of the way Latin as a literary language changed over time. One way to do this is to look at mannerism, or deliberate obscurity of style for rhetorical effect, as a persistent feature of Latin literature from late antiquity on, in a dialectic with classicism on the one hand, and biblical simplicity on the other. This leads to a revisionist view of the earliest stages of humanistic poetry in Trecento Italy, as growing organically from pre-existing mediaeval stylistic canons.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.