Epic

Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time....

John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language....

With Professor Esolen you will enter the terrible gates of Hell and progress level by infernal level to its diabolical depths. Professor Esolen places a special emphasis on the drama of the poem, leading you through each canto in succession....

Blake Ritson, David Warner, Hattie Morahan and John Hurt star in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Dante's epic poem "Inferno"....

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide, his ascent of Mount Purgatory and his encounter with his dead love Beatrice, and finally, his arrival in Heaven....

The epic grandeur of Dante's masterpiece has inspired readers and listeners for 700 years and has entered the human imagination....

Little is known about the Ancient Greek oral poet Homer, the supposed 8th century BC author of the world-read Iliad and his later masterpiece, The Odyssey....

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War....

Dante's Divine Comedy is considered to be not only the most important epic poem in Italian literature, but also one of the greatest poems ever written....

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey has been the standard translation for more than three generations of students and poets. Macmillan Audio is delighted to publish the first ever audio edition of this classic work, the greatest of all epic poems....

In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time....

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife....

The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry....

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective....

Humphries has rendered (Ovid's) love poetry with conspicuous success into English which is neither obtrusively colloquial nor awkwardly antique....

The narrative describes the quest of the Arthurian knight Parzival for the Holy Grail. His journey is filled with incident, from tournaments and sieges to chivalrous deeds and displays of true love....

A powerful and poignant translation of Vergil’s epic poem, newly equipped with introduction and notes....

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings....

Composed during the 14th century in the English Midlands, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the events that follow when a mysterious green-coloured knight rides into King Arthur's Camelot in deep mid-winter....

The Iliad and The Odyssey are epic poems traditionally attributed to Homer, of which the written versions are dated to the 8th century BCE. Chronicling events in the Greek Bronze Age, this magnificent pair of poems forms the cornerstone of Western literature....

The power and the beauty of The Iliad resound again across 2,700 years in Stephen Mitchell's exciting new translation....

One of the finest German medieval epic poems, The Lay of the Nibelungs is perhaps best known now as one of the principal sources for Wagner’s four-part music drama The Ring of the Nibelung....

Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up through Purgatory, and on to Paradise....

The Kalevala is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.Beginning with the traditional Finnish creation myth, the Kalevala branches out into stories of the creation of the earth, plants, creatures, and the sky....

In a 20-year journey, fabulous fantasy mixes with extraordinary reality as Odysseus encounters enchantresses, nymphs, monsters, prophets, and ghosts....

In the heart of the western wilderness, a lone hiker encounters an ancient traveler with a story unlike any other—Lucifer himself. In this 1667-line epic poem—Paradise Lost was published in 1667—Devil’s Desert reimagines the creation of the universe through the eyes of Lucifer. Blending novel Satanic mythology with philosophical musings, the author weaves a tale of cosmic wonder, loss, and the ultimate solitude of existence.

So Laeya--the Canaanite goddess Athirat masked in human form--asks after a crucial battle. Situated in the interimperial turmoil of the Late Bronze Age, Canaad follows this heroine's journey as it dovetails with that of Aqhat, a refugee from the Levantine coast. After tragedy casts Aqhat into the desert, a prophecy affords him the opportunity to slay three deities before the year's end and thereby become divine himself.

The Wolf poem was inspired by William Blake's "The Tyger". It has the same regular form & meter as "The Tyger". With tempo and stanza (of the quatrain type), and is about one single animal in the natural world. Where it differs from William Blake's poem is that the "The Tyger" has more religious connotations, not surprising for the times in which it was written.

Alexander Pope was celebrated for his command of classical Greek and produced seminal translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Prior to the preparation of these translations, Pope took advantage of his mastery of the classical style and also his waspish wit to compose a burlesque epic about the theft of a lock of hair. The incident that inspired Pope was related to him by his friend John Caryll. Lord Petre had cut off a lock of the hair of Arabella Fermor, whom he was courting at the time, without asking the lady's permission.

The Bhagavadgita is part of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, and it is one of the major religious documents of the world, occupying in Hinduism a position not unlike the Sermon on the Mount in Christianity. One of the most celebrated treasures of world literature as well, it is in the form of a poetic dialogue between the epic's hero, Arjuna, and his friend Krishna, believed to be an incarnation of God.