1 - Goethe's Epic Ambitions

Summary

THE ARCH OF EUROPEAN EPIC rests on Homer as the first and on Milton as the last pillar, encompassing in its sweep major contributors such as Vergil, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, as well as lesser ones such as Lucan, Statius, Pulci, Boiardo, Vida, Drayton, Cowley, Camões, and Klopstock. Several of the English Romantics did try to produce an epic. Wordsworth completed The Prelude; Keats began an epic with Hyperion; and Byron may lay some claim to the tradition with Don Juan. On the whole, however, critics have generally been uneasy about the attempts to produce epics since the eighteenth century. David Quint has expressed the consensus near the conclusion of his Epic and Empire: “Milton pronounces the demise of epic as a genre, and since he had no great successors, he appears from the perspective of a later literary history to have fulfilled the ambition of every epic poet: to have written the epic to end all epics.” Were it not for the fact that German literary historians bear the primary responsibility for the exclusion of Goethe from the precinct of the epic, one might suspect lingering nationalism of the sort that characterized the debates about the ancients and the moderns in the insistence that Milton marks the end of the tradition. Goethe's exclusion is due partly to the difficult genre issues, but a major cause has been the continued emphasis of Goethe scholars upon the notion of Goethe as a solitary genius whose works emerged from the great man's personal experience.