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...
England First published 1954-1955 (written between 1937 and 1949) J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien, was first published in three parts—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—in...
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 written in Switzerland and completed in 1961 H.D., Helen in Egypt When H. D., or Hilda Doolittle, completed her long poem Helen in Egypt in 1961, she explicitly construed it as a response to the rambling, ultimately unfinished modernist...
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...
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