Conventions of epic and mock-epic poetry

1. Classical Tradition – Epics, Tragedies, Myths – Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Ovid, Catullus
A History of English Literature....
1350 – Geoffrey Chaucer (courtly love/ fabliaux)
1400 – Petrarch and Dante – beginning of the Renaissance. Rise of the Sonnet.
1500 – Tudor Poetry – Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare
1600 – Elizabethan/ Jacobean – Donne, Marvell, Milton
1700 – Augustine Age – Pope, Dryden
1800 – Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats
1830 – 1901 – Victorian era. Homework Presentation!
1900 – 1914 – Turn of the century – Yeats, Millay, Hardy etc.
1920s - Modernism (Joyce, T. S. Eliot, e. e. Cummings)
1930s – 30s – Auden, Macniece
1950s – Mid-century Disillusionment – Philip Larkin, Betjemen
1960s – Confessional Poetry – Sylvia Plath, Red Hughes
1970s – Post-modernism – Duffy, Dunn, Cope etc.

2. Homework – Mini-Lesson on how Love is
presented in a Victorian Poet...
Choose your poet and bring in 1 poem they wrote about
love.
• Summarise the poem.
• What kinds of love are presented in the poem?
• How does the writer use structure, form and language
to present it?
• Provide 2 interpretations of love in the poem (i.e. Do
some research or provide a feminist vs Marxist reading)
• How does it link to the context of Victorian Poetry?
• What other poems could we link to?

3. Victorian Poets...
Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam, Maud)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the
Portugese)
Robert Browning (A Woman’s Last Word, My Last
Duchess)
Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market, Remember, In an
Artist’s Studio)
Emily Dickinson (He fumbles at your spirit, Wild
Nights)
Thomas Hardy (I said to Love, The Going, The Voice)

5. Epic
A long story, told in hexameter, passed down
originally through the oral tradition. Often
involves mythological heroes, gods and
nymphs. Famous epics:
Homer – The Iliad and the Odyssey
Virgil – The Aeneid
Dante – The Divine Comedy
Milton – Paradise Lost

6. What kind of love is presented in the
following pictures and key couples?

7. Paris and Helen of Troy
Marlowe’s Dr.
Faustus

8. Hector and Andromache
Book 6 of The Iliad

9. Aeneas and Creusa
Book II of The
Aeneid.

10. What kind of love is presented in the
following pictures?

13. Wordle of dramatic climax – what kind of love will be presented?

14. Written in 1712
Alexander Pope was a member of Queen
Anne’s royal court and later George I.
It was a time of pomp, richness and
extravagance: the upper classes in
particular were thought of as vain,
superficial and wasting money. The
aristocrats still held immense power
and were considered to be ridiculous.
This is the age of the Enlightenment –
where order, intellectual control and
reason are held much higher than
spontaneity and imagination. Formal
perfection and complete control of
language – often with witty or satirical
aims – was a major goal of the
movement.

17. Two Households, Both alike in dignity
Alexander Pope has attempted to mend the rift
between two families at war through writing a
long poem. Lord Petre has been accused by his
former flirting partner, Arabella Fermor, of
sneaking up behind her and stealing a curl of her
hair without asking permission first. Arabella’s
father, Lord Fermor, is obviously shocked and
appalled by such radical independence and has
since banned Lord Petre from seeing his
daughter. Now both families are at war. Only
Pope’s poem can save us from the unhumanity of
such an argument.

18. Mock Epic
Mock-epics parody the high-flown and elaborate
conventions of classical literature, particularly
Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Humour is created through juxtaposing the great
and the little, exaggerating the heroic until it
becomes absurd and through the incongruity of
the situation versus the style of rhetoric.
Very popular during the Augustine period.

19. • Commentary
• This canto is full of classic examples of Pope’s masterful use of the heroic couplet. In
introducing Hampton Court Palace, he describes it as the place where Queen Anne
“dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.” This line employs a zeugma, a
rhetorical device in which a word or phrase modifies two other words or phrases in a
parallel construction, but modifies each in a different way or according to a different
sense. Here, the modifying word is “take”; it applies to the paralleled terms “counsel”
and “tea.” But one does not “take” tea in the same way one takes counsel, and the
effect of the zeugma is to show the royal residence as a place that houses both serious
matters of state and frivolous social occasions. The reader is asked to contemplate that
paradox and to reflect on the relative value and importance of these two different
registers of activity. (For another example of this rhetorical technique, see lines 157–8:
“Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, / when husbands, or when lapdogs
breathe their last.”) A similar point is made, in a less compact phrasing, in the second
and third verse-paragraphs of this canto. Here, against the gossip and chatter of the
young lords and ladies, Pope opens a window onto more serious matters that are
occurring “meanwhile” and elsewhere, including criminal trials and executions, and
economic exchange.
• The rendering of the card game as a battle constitutes an amusing and deft narrative
feat. By parodying the battle scenes of the great epic poems, Pope is suggesting that
the energy and passion once applied to brave and serious purposes is now expended
on such insignificant trials as games and gambling, which often become a mere front for
flirtation. The structure of “the three attempts” by which the lock is cut is a convention
of heroic challenges, particularly in the romance genre. The romance is further invoked
in the image of Clarissa arming the Baron—not with a real weapon, however, but with a
pair of sewing scissors. Belinda is not a real adversary, or course, and Pope makes it
plain that her resistance—and, by implication, her subsequent distress—is to some
degree an affectation. The melodrama of her screams is complemented by the ironic
comparison of the Baron’s feat to the conquest of nations.