The Aeneid and the Problematic Prestige of Epic

Literary tradition stretching back to antiquity ensures that for a national literature of any pretension a great national epic remains imperative. Virgil owes much of his preeminence to his accomplishment of this feat. Yet by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the genre is deeply problematic. The imperative and Virgil's accomplishment are undiminished, yet precisely how to compose a poem according to the definition that will do more than simply illustrate adherence to the definition remains a standing challenge; and one that many attempt, confident that epic represents the supreme achievement of culture. In this vein Dryden will begin his “Dedication of the Aeneis” with the sentence, “A heroick poem, truly such, is undoubedly (sic) the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform.” Boileau too continues the preferment of epic to drama, accomplishing in his L'Art poetique the transition from tragedy to epic with the understatement that epic is “d'un air plus grand encore.” Gottsched, as noted previously, repeats and propagates this truism of criticism for German readers in his Critische Dichtkunst; epic is “das rechte Hauptwerk und Meisterstück der ganzen Poesie.”

This same tradition has also with equal dogmatism fixed the subject matter of epic in a manner that makes it impossible for the modern poet to produce a work that will hold a place in the vernacular similar to that achieved by Homer among the Greeks and Virgil among the Latins.