Milman Parry and Albert Lord have argued that the Homeric epics, the earliest works of Western literature, were fundamentally an oral poetic form. Parry and Lord also contend that the most likely source for written texts of the epics of Homer was dictation from an oral performance. This facilitates memorization, as the poet is recalling each episode in turn and using the completed episodes to recreate the entire epic as he performs it. What they demonstrated was that oral epics tend to be constructed in short episodes, each of equal status, interest and importance.
Early 20th-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems. In these traditions, poetry is transmitted to the audience and from performer to performer by purely oral means. Oral tradition was used alongside written scriptures to communicate and facilitate the spread of culture. The first epics were products of preliterate societies and oral history poetic traditions. Paterson by William Carlos Williams, published in five volumes from 1946 to 1958, was inspired in part by another modern epic, The Cantos by Ezra Pound. Epic poems of the modern era include Derek Walcott's Omeros, Mircea Cărtărescu's The Levant and Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz.
įamous examples of epic poetry include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Indian Mahabharata and Rāmāyaṇa in Sanskrit and Silappatikaram and Manimekalai in Tamil, the Persian Shahnameh, the Ancient Greek Odyssey and Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Old English Beowulf, Dante's Divine Comedy, the Finnish Kalevala, the German Nibelungenlied, the French Song of Roland, the Spanish Cantar de mio Cid, the Portuguese Os Lusíadas, the Armenian Daredevils of Sassoun, John Milton's Paradise Lost, The Secret History of the Mongols, the Kyrgyz Manas, and the Malian Sundiata. 3rd century BC–3rd century AD), which consists of 100,000 ślokas or over 200,000 verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), as well as long prose passages, so that at ~1.8 million words it is roughly twice the length of Shahnameh, four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa, and roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. The longest written epic from antiquity is the ancient Indian Mahabharata ( c. Although recognized as a historical figure, Gilgamesh, as represented in the epic, is a largely legendary or mythical figure. The poem details the exploits of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk. 2500–1300 BCE), which was recorded in ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire. The oldest epic recognized is the Epic of Gilgamesh ( c. Later writers like Virgil, Apollonius of Rhodes, Dante, Camões, and Milton adopted and adapted Homer's style and subject matter, but used devices available only to those who write. Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics, such as those of Homer, were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received in tradition and add to the epic in their performances.
The first edition (1835) of the Finnish national epic poem Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot Tablet containing a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh Literature
0 kommentar(er)
