Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition.

Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived ; ;

no strikingly effective element of speech in the extant poems can with assurance be said not to have been a commonplace in the vaster epic corpus that may have existed at the beginning of the first millennium before Christ.

He plays an important role in Homer's Iliad and in the Epic Cycle, a series of epic poems about the Trojan War.

Notwithstanding the distinction he enjoyed as a tragic poet, he appears to have had greater merit as a writer of epic poems, elegies, epigrams, and cynaedi.

Among his epic poems, we possess the titles and some fragments of three pieces: the Fisherman, Kirka or Krika, which, however, is designated by Athenaeus as doubtful, and Helena, Of his elegies, some beautiful fragments are still extant.

Crowne have proposed the idea that the poem was passed down from reciter to reciter under the theory of oral-formulaic composition, which hypothesises that epic poems were ( at least to some extent ) improvised by whoever was reciting them.

Early twentieth-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems.

The Saint Thomas Christians (" Nasrani ") of southwestern India may have connections with the Essenes, according to the Manimekalai, one of the great Tamil epic poems, which refers to a people called " Issani ".

Category: Characters in epic poems

Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure and often their in medias res plot developments.

The Greek language holds an important place in the histories of Europe, the more loosely defined Western world, and Christianity ; the canon of ancient Greek literature includes works of monumental importance and influence for the future Western canon, such as the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey.

An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many formulaic phrases typical of extempore epic traditions ; even entire verses are at times repeated.

It is probable, therefore, that the story of the Trojan War as reflected in the Homeric poems derives from a tradition of epic poetry founded on a war which actually took place.

Growing out of this courtly culture, Middle High German literature reached its peak in lyrical love poetry, the Minnesang, and in narrative epic poems such as Tristan, Parzival, and the Nibelungenlied.

A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry ; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines.

Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the " canonical standard " that all educated Italians could understand.

Medieval Ruthenian epic poems mention Ruthenian warriors fighting the Jewish Giant ( Богатырь Жидовин ).

Finnish born nationalist and linguist Kaarle Akseli Gottlund ( 1796 – 1875 ) expressed his desire for a Finnish epic in a similar vein to The Iliad, Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied compiled from the various poems and songs spread over most of Finland.

The collection contains three pages of the Shahnameh, an epic book of poems by Ferdowsi in Persian, and a Syrian metalwork named the Barberini Vase.

It is best known for being the focus of the Trojan War described in the Greek Epic Cycle and especially in the Iliad, one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer.

The Odyssey (, Odysseia ) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer.

Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson from about 1760.

Category: Forged epic poems

Anglo-Saxon and Greek epic each provide on two occasions a seemingly authentic account of the narration of verse in the heroic age.

Category: Ancient Greek epic poets

Bust of Homer, the ancient Greek epic poet.

Cretan authors have made important contributions to Greek Literature throughout the modern period ; major names include Vikentios Kornaros, creator of the 17th century epic romance Erotokritos ( Greek Ερωτόκριτος ), and in the 20th century Nikos Kazantzakis.

Cerberus featured in many prominent works of Greek and Roman literature, most famously in Virgil's Aeneid, Peisandros of Rhodes ' epic poem the Labours of Hercules, the story of Orpheus in Plato's Symposium, and in Homer's Iliad, which is the only known reference to one of Heracles ' labours which first appeared in a literary source.

An example is John Milton's Paradise Lost, an " epic elaboration of the Judeo-Christian mythology " and also a " veritable encyclopedia of myths from the Greek and Roman tradition ".

It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin, and was consequently considered to be the Grand Style of classical poetry.

Early epic poetry was also accompanied by music, and pitch changes associated with the accented Greek must have highlighted the melody, though the exact mechanism is still a topic of discussion.

An epic ( from the Ancient Greek adjective ( epikos ), from ( epos ) " word, story, poem ") is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.

* Calliope ( Greek muse of epic poetry )

The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic.

It was the first Latin poem to adopt the dactylic hexameter metre used in Greek epic and didactic poetry, leading it to become the standard metre for these genres in Latin poetry.

In the Western classical tradition, Homer (;, Hómēros ) is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet.

It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter.

Category: Early Greek epic poets

It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid.

The Greek historian Herodotus stated that the Etruscans came from Lydia, repeated in Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid, and Etruscan-like language was found on the Lemnos stele.

Andronicus also translated Homer's Greek epic the Odyssey into an old type of Latin verse called Saturnian.