| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
K/NDS OF POETRY. 9 |
||
|
more regular. Milton's Lycidas, Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, Collins's Dirge in Cymbeline, Burns's Man was made to Mourn, and Tennyson's In Memoriam axe the finest specimens we have.*
2.—EPIC OR HEROIC POETRY.
This term is applied only to great and lengthy narrative poems, in which the dramatic element is also introduced in the form of impassioned harangues, detailing some important national enterprise or the adventures of a distinguished hero. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's sEneid, Dante's Inferno and Paradiso, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Camoens's Lusiad, and Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained, stand at the head of this species of poetry as the Classical Epics.
Scarcely inferior to these, and differing from them only in the fact that they depict less dignified undertakings, and which are fictitious, come such poems as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Tennyson's Idylls of the King. These may be classed under this head as Romantic Epics. Byron's Childe Harold may be included in the same category preferably to being considered a purely descriptive poem.
Another subdivision of poems of this class, but with still less of the heroic element in them, may, for want of a more suitable name, be grouped
" The rearler is referred to Palg ave's *' Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the Kn ■lish Language." |
||