The Critical Attack Upon the Epic in the English Romantic Movement

For critics in the Age of Pope the classical epic was the only genuine epic. It was regarded as a principal, if not always the supreme, form of literature; as an unsurpassable vehicle of moral instruction, of ageless wisdom lightly cloaked by an exterior of violence and adventure, of sentiments “whose truth convinced at sight We find.” Stressing the permanently valuable as they did, these critics spoke of Homer and Virgil as the greatest of geniuses in poetry but rarely treated them as human beings who had actually lived in specific times and places: both were visualized as “conscious” craftsmen skilled in adapting plots to enforce basic “lessons” and equally skilled in blending into ideal harmony such elements of the epic as action and episode, description and dialogue, the supernatural and the human. To be sure, historical backgrounds were not entirely ignored: Pope wrote at considerable length of Homer's “religion, country, genius of his age”; and men of wit like Swift and Dennis compared the excellences of ancient and of modern literature in general. With its emphasis upon matters of form and universality, an essentially Aristotelian approach was, nevertheless, the dominant approach of Augustan England.