Epic

[porphyry]

I was unpleasantly reminded today that when I was in Junior High School (as we called it), I attempted to write an epic poem. The subject was a war fought far in the future between Christianity and Atheism. Atheism lost and the truth was forever extinguished by superstitious oppression. The only good thing I can say about it is that it is now completely lost so there is no chance of it appearing on your computer screen any time in the future. The other notable thing I can say is that I undertook this task when I was about the same age that Keats spent the summer translating the whole of the Aeneid.

The comment I want to make, is, in contrast to Keats, the education I had provided absolutely nothing to support the ambition to write epic.I am sure none of my High School English teaches could have given a good definition of Epic, and I am positive that none of them could even scan poetry (if they had been able to, they would surely have mentioned it on some occasion, instead of pretending every year when we did poetry that it is possible to write haiku in English). I think in my senior year we might have been assigned the first book of Paradise Lost--not surprising since that teacher regularly descended to benthic depths of boringness that far exceed the tranquilizing effect of hypnosis. Judging literature by this experience, I avoided English in college, and did not read any literature with a professor until I got to the Eclogues and Georgics in Grad School. By that age Keats was already dead.

Its reasonable to assume that I would never have had the poetic talent to actually write an epic under any circumstances, but even if I had, the education I had did absolutely nothing to support it. Could someone with the talent, with that same education--and there is nothing exceptional about it--ever have been able to write epic? What would he have become? A Film editor? A graphic designer? An academic historian? Is the creation of an educational system in which literature plays no important role the reason we have no poets today? No Composers? No painters? How many people today have never heard classical music (a term we have to use since, if we just say music, most readers [not most readers here, but at large] would otherwise think of commercial product) outside of Looney Toons and Merry Melodies? How would a person like that even imagine becoming a composer? How could someone who had never read epic, hope to write it?

Comments

[benicek.livejournal.com]

A modern day Keats would never write an epic because there's no market for one. Nobody would ever buy it, let alone pay to publish it in paper. There's barely even any point writing even light novels, as the market for new fiction is disappearing so fast. While we're at it, barely any point training to be a journalist either, as the newspapers increasingly avoid publishing real news and are laying off journalists in their thousands. I wonder what business Mark Twain would have gone into if he'd lived in our era.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The situation is nearly the same as in seventh century Gaul, except we have all these shiny toys and get to live a bit longer.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Yes, the public demand for light entertainment film epics has mushroomed.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Twenty-two James Bond films and counting......

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

I've always thought the best part of having children would be educating them and then seeing what they grew into. But what a disappointment it would be to give them all the advantages of language and education only to have them do nothing with it.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

They used to teach Latin to seven years olds. that would be a research project in itself to revive that knowledge. Roman boys were taught Greek at that age by memorizing Homer, but there must have been more tricks to it than just that.

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

I took Latin for two years in high school. My teacher was among the laziest teachers I have met, though he managed to send me to the office on the last day of school in my second year, forcing me to spend the first day of summer in detention. He was later fired for incompetance.

[eurynome1967.livejournal.com]

Yes, the norm in England in the 19th and early 20th centuries was for posh boys to be taught Latin from the age of about 5 and Greek from about 7. There's no doubt that they did it, and that most of the boys reached a standard in the languages by their 20s which I probably haven't reached yet, and had read most of the corpus in both languages. I do think though that (a) it was a selected group of presumably well-nourished boys from a good gene pool and (b) that they were able to do it because that was the main component of their education - no National Curriculum to hold them back.

Nowadays we mostly start them on Latin at 11 and Greek at 13 (in the very small number of schools which have the chance, I mean) which works okay, but only about 1/6 choose to take Latin for GCSE.
A couple of years ago, I tried teaching Greek to a 10-year-old whose mother wanted him to be stretched academically: he liked the alphabet and the first transliteration exercises very much. But when it got to the first piece of grammar the lesson fell apart. Right, I said, now we're going to do a verb. In Greek, the verbs are made up of the front bit which contains the meaning, and the end bit which tells you who is doing it. Here is the verb παυ- which means "to stop" ... Boy interrupted me: "But that's stupid! It can't mean 'stop'! It isn't even spelt S T O P, it's spelt 'pow'!" Next 30 minutes spent in explaining that Greek isn't just English in a different alphabet, and why languages have different vocabulary from English. *sigh* He gave up after another couple of weeks.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

I wonder what my 3 year old daughter is going to "do" with her Czech mother-tongue. Maybe it will only ever be used to speak to her mother.

[vonjunzt.livejournal.com]

Perhaps she'll be a Pavel scholar. Or perhaps she'll just use it to order beer in Prague.

[eurynome1967.livejournal.com]

Having studied and taught Classics for - ! *gak* ! - 30 years and counting, I would say that the modern genre which is equivalent to epic in its ancient form (Homer, Vergil, plus Ovid if you count the Metamorphoses which I do, Apollonius, Lucan, Hesiod, and all the other lost chaps) is definitely film. I am not going to bore everyone with exactly why unless people really want to know ;)

This entry really spoke to me. But, Mr Malkhos, I think we should not be ashamed of the things we wrote when we were young (though I have the opening scenes of a very bad verse drama, now you come to mention it). I specialised in short finely-crafted poems. And, actually, I regret throwing some of them out when I was in my mid-20s. I would really like to re-read the one that started "It's two days to two years to the day today" ...

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Film is an obvious choice. On the other hand its so collaborative while Verse is so inherently individual.

I recently took revenge on an editor for assigning unnecessary rewrites by giving her something similar to your line there: "Eucles may well be added merely for euphony with Euboleus."

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

You should send him an e-mail of thanks for that rejection.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I, on the other hand, have never seen facebook.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Add me!

[eurynome1967.livejournal.com]

(unless one is an Analyst re: Homer ...)

Nice line :)

I say film mostly because of (a) the issues of pace and focus, which always strike me as quite cinematic every time I teach the Aeneid particularly, and (b) the fact that the public tend to go to into a film knowing a great deal about it in advance, and indeed watch again. Also the tendency to graphic violence. Especially in the Aeneid. Thank goodness Seneca didn't try to write an epic, now I come to think of it ...

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Oh, if only he had!

[eurynome1967.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I might try writing it, at least in outline, with a few passages in detail. Not, I mean, in Senecan Latin hexameter - verse composition was never my forte in Latin (though I can write you a nice bit of electrum prose). Now thinking about which story he would have chosen ...