Portugal 1934 Francisco Pessoa, Mensagem Francisco Pessoa’s Mensagem (1934) is an esoteric national epic simultaneously steeped in reverential homage to the past while paving the way for what it means to compose an epic in the modern era. This duality can be...
United States First published in 1957 Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged When we think of epics, we typically think of long poems like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Popol Vuh. However, prose works like Moby Dick and The...
United States 1985 Frederick Turner, The New World: An Epic Poem When Frederick Turner’s The New World first appeared in 1985 in the Princeton series of Contemporary Poets there was nothing quite like it in American literature. Written in unrhymed, five-stress, often...
Saint Lucia (West Indies) Published: 1990 Derek Walcott Omeros Omeros (1990) upends the conventions of canonical Western epics by turning Caribbean fishermen into twentieth century heroes. In its titular allusion to Homer as well as in its topical and formal...
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