'Not Less but More Heroic': The Epic Task and the Renaissance Hero

Abstract

Great epics appear only at rare intervals in time and space: Homer's Greece, Vergil's Rome, Dante's Florence, Milton's England. So it is remarkable that there were so many worthy contenders during the Renaissance. And it is unremarkable that no great epic has appeared since the Renaissance. The critics and commentators who maintain that, as the Renaissance world-view faded, epic poetry died, the heroic vision was blurred, and the epic strain became tangled in the novel are pronouncing a premature epitaph, and their pronouncements derive from misconceptions of epic itself and of its contribution to our notion of the heroic. It would be simpler, more to the point, and more accurate to say that few writers have really tried to create great epics since Paradise Lost.1 The epic did not decline or die during the Renaissance. It did, however, change. Since the genre or tradition of epic is definable mainly by its inner vitality, its capacity for change, this is simply to say that the Renaissance epic poets by and large did what their predecessors had done. Milton was by no means the first to think that the tradition was really a challenge, a

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