Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910

Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's masterly book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War One. The Romantic and Victorian eras were shaped by bewildering upheavals, which summoned great poets to the supreme test of skill that epic represents. Blake and Wordsworth, Keats and Byron, Tennyson and both Brownings, Morris and Swinburne all met the test with honor, which means that they, like great epic poets before them, successfully rewrote the generic rules to address changing realities. The occluded story of their adventures in experimental narrative has an interest of its own. It also impinges on our received literary history: as the fact that prominent novelists like Scott, Disraeli, Eliot, and Hardy also wrote verse epics will suggest, our histories of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry should be rewritten in each other's light.