college notes, found.

"Was murking about with the possibility of an Age producing an Epic being in some kind of inverse relation to its interest in expansion - that with the 18th C and the further expansion of the British empire, epic starts becoming mock epic. And I wondered if, if this relation holds, then how much more so in that age where the sun never sets... And maybe also because, coming from a post-colonial background, I have a soft spot for the 19th Century, and maybe too, the idea of travelling from island to island in the East Indies is a sort of colonial Odyssey - where some men do die, some men do go native (and some native women are seen as enchantress figures - Raffles vs Colonel Farquhar) and certainly question of what hospitality means come up - guests of the local Sultan turned into dabblers in local politics, and so on. But it's true, isn't it, that almost every major 19th century poet tried to write an Epic (and failed.) Which critic was it who praised Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum for its Homeric qualities? They really tried. If the 18th century coped with their sense of being too late by turning Epic into satire, ("I want a hero, an uncommon want" - Don Juan,) the Victorians were frightfully earnest about it. And maybe that has to do with how we think of epic as being foundational, rallying stories, and how in contrast, the foundations of faith and the cohesiveness of society were disintegrating. And maybe that has to do with the idea of learning slowly too. The sense of late-blooming vs precociousness playing out in the anxiety of influence, of how to surpass our literary ancestors, of how we're latecomers in a tradition, and how we're in an unheroic age (i'm not sure if this connects too, but i just thought of another way of looking at the 18th and 19th century response to the Epic, that maybe, in an Age of Reason, a Heroic-Romantic (well romance in the sense of the secular scripture?) vision cannot stand, and they wrote parodies, but in an Age of Doubt, a Heroic vision becomes both a crutch and a yardstick) I was thinking particularly of Tennyson these last classes, how for instance the Lotos Eaters is very much about the anxiety of homecoming, and that it's subversive enough to be sympathetic to the idea of forgetting. And particularly Ulysses, and the hints of the horrors of following knowledge like a sinking star, and that seems to both celebrate the precocity and desire to strive and not to yield, but also has something to do with "slow learning" - there's something to be said for learning slowly, - rather than biting into the fruit and seeing it all at once, as it were."