This chapter introduces the key issues raised by the poetry of Hipponax. After assessing the available data on his life – his date, place of origin, and the implications of his name – we examine three life stories told by ancient sources, which potentially illustrate ancient receptions of his ‘autobiographical’ poetry. Then we enter the world of Hipponax’s poetry by discussing his reported feud with the sculptor Boupalos and the other characters, places, and objects that populate it. We sketch a novel approach to the question of its fictionality, while also paying due attention to the other interesting questions posed by the corpus. We conclude by looking at some elements of Hipponax’s poetic language: his play with ‘foreign’ words, his fondness for bizarre compounds, his use of similes, his reception of epic, and his uniquely creative use of metre.

There is a recent scholarly consensus on the nature of Hipponax’s interaction with Homer, especially with the figure of Odysseus in the Odyssey. According to this picture, the iambist is an early precursor to the Hellenistic poets – alluding, combining and recombining different Homeric passages in a manner we would routinely associate with Callimachus or Apollonius. Yet this picture is entirely anachronistic, divorced from the evidentiary and methodological difficulties we encounter in thinking about textual dynamics in the Archaic world, and the apparent cases of Homeric interaction are overplayed and misidentified. This chapter surveys the evidence and its scholarship with a sceptical eye, and comes to a sceptical conclusion: not only is it unjustified to relate Hipponax directly with Homer, but it also closes our eyes to the flexibility with which, and the variety of ways in which, Hipponax attempted to invoke the heroic world and its medium for his own poetry.

Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

This chapter examines the discourse of religious belief in Latin epic of the first century CE. The first section advances a methodological case for the value of high-register poetry as evidence for Roman thinking about religious belief. Building on the model of Charles King, the argument highlights the implications of the literary evidence for key theoretical debates about belief. The second section consists of a series of case studies demonstrating Roman imperial epic’s interest in the role of empiricism in shaping beliefs about the divine. Human testing of the gods features especially prominently in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Statius’ Thebaid: how to recognise a deity, whether a mortal can perform the same acts as a god, what qualities distinguish the human from the divine. Using Ovid’s Lycaon and Niobe and Statius’ Capaneus as paradigms of a broader phenomenon, the chapter shows how Latin epic develops both a vocabulary and behavioural code of theological scrutiny, which subjects divinity to rigorous examination by mortals as a method of grounding belief. The motivations for this poetic line of inquiry can be traced not only to philosophical discourse but also to contemporary practices of emperor cult and deification.

This chapter maps Allen Ginsberg’s magnificent epic which dissects the US in the Vietnam era. It shared the National Book Award in 1973. Anchored by “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the volume’s pivotal poem, it boasts the key line, “I here declare the end of the war,” and includes seventy-five other poems, among them elegies for Neal Cassady and Che Guevara. The chapter shows how Ginsberg links fragments – newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, lyrics from popular songs and more – into a coherent lament for America itself. It also dissects the journal the poet kept while traveling across the nation and that provided him with the raw material for The Fall of America.

Dante traces the question of happiness to our nature, knowledge of which is available.His decision to persist in rational inquiry is not arbitrary as rests on such knowledge. At the heart of Paradiso Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida about Florentine politics and nobility because the needed self-knowledge is gained through reflection on political life. From the contemplative unity characteristic of the previous Heaven to the political conflict in Mars is an ascent.

The key discussion concerns how candidly Dante’s poem should express the truth. The literary question points to the political problem of posed by the enduring tensions among human goods, and these tensions disclose the conflicts inherent in an embodied mind. Among beings that desire and reason, that are “mortal” and aware of their mortality, there is decisive inequality, inequality regarding the willingness and ability to discern truth.The scope of this difference defies the possibility that good can be understood by deduction from a principle or law, making it a matter for inquiry. The life devoted to this inquiry, as indicated in these central Cantos, is available here and now and grounds every genuinely common good. Dante calls his epic of self-reflection a “comedy.”

If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

This chapter considers James Joyce’s paradigmatic modernist epic, Ulysses (1922), reading its meticulous reconstruction of 1904 Dublin as a nostalgic return to the author’s homeland and childhood. While scholars have recently recognized the role of nostalgia in Joyce’s work, they have overlooked its significance to the form and content of Ulysses. The text privileges personal experience of a place and culture over linear ideas of national heritage; in so doing, it disrupts xenophobic accounts of Irish identity founded on racial purity. Its juxtaposition of everyday experience with ancient epic sidesteps an exclusionary idea of heritage while retaining the literary resonance of mythic parallels. In other words, it rejects an unhealthy obsession with the past through its use of nostalgia.

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

Rather than view nineteenth-century Australian poetry as simply imitative of British models, this chapter examines how such poetry explored aspects of time and space in distinctive ways as well as from alternative perspectives. It considers how Charles Harpur conceptualised shifts in temporal scale, how Caroline Leakey questioned positioning and precedence, and how Eliza Dunlop engaged with the idea of distance that extended to aspects of the human condition more generally. It also analyses how writers such as Mary Bailey, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall and R. H. Horne (who lived in Australia for a substantial period) reconfigured classical and English literary traditions through antipodal positions that raised questions around heritage and history. The chapter then discusses women’s navigation of delimiting conventions of authorship. Lastly, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century Australian poetry started to voice nation in an embryonic form.

This chapter considers the empire- and nation-building capacities of the long poem in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, including epics by R. H. Horne, Will X. Redman and Rex Ingamells. It then analyses revisions of the epic in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples that undo settler monumentality, explore other cultural narratives or make use of other media such as film. It discusses the popularity of the verse novel, observing its beginnings in the World War I writing of C. J. Dennis. It considers the renaissance of the verse novel in the late twentieth century, examining how its cross-genre form was often able to accommodate transgressive desires. The rising popularity of young adult verse novels is also detailed. The chapter traces the emergence of non-fiction long poetry, viewing it through the sub-categories of documentary, history and biography. It then discusses Indigenous long poems and recent experimental long poems, including ones that explore visual, conceptual and digital possibilities.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.