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Epic Fable
138
able that critics have found a tragic hero when they have turned to the
Poetics. What is puzzling about the conventional assessment of the
nature of epic is that it overlooks not only the positive side of what
Aristotle has to say-his presentation of the epic model as being, in the
Homeric type, a self-sufficient and complete action (1459a19 ff.)-but
also the explicit and repeated rejection of the idea that the organization
of an epic depends on an individual character (1451a16 ff., 1459a37).
For Aristotle, this is a misconception to be put quite on a par with or-
ganizing an epic around one period of time. When Homer undertook
the Iliad, according to Aristotle, he selected one part of the war as his
"one action," and incorporated other parts as episodes (1459a35 ff.).
Aristotle sees no single character as the center of the Iliad, as becomes
plain when he goes on to contrast Homer's practice with that of lesser
poets: "But the others make a poem about one man or one period of
time" (1459a37 ff). To Aristotle the Iliad is "the imitation of a single
action" (1462bl1), and this is no irrelevant formalism. As Getty puts
it, "the centre round which the Iliad revolves is not Achilles but the
wrath of Achilles" (p.xxvi). Even within the proem, when the subject
of the wrath of Achilles has been announced, the wrath (17m) de-
velops a bold syntactical autonomy, controlling the first five lines in an
extraordinary way, governing three verbs in three successive lines
(2 - 4).' Achilles's wrath is indeed his, but the kindling, course, and as-
suaging of the wrath comprehend many people and many interests; the
poet's focus on the wrath provides him with a structural and a thematic
plenitude which would have been denied him if he had sung "about one
man." James Redfield has written well on the impoverishment of the
poem that comes from various influential modern readings which see
the poem as centering on "Achilles' inner experience." In Redfield's
fine book Hector receives the full attention he deserves, and we come to
see that indeed, as he puts it, "in some sense the story of the Iliad is the
story of the relation between these two heroes."8
Aristotle sets off the Odyssey also as distinct from poems "about one
man" (1451a16 ff.). This may appear paradoxical, until one realizes
that what Aristotle was looking for in this poem as well as in the Iliad
was the outline of a cohesive and "epic" action. That the action might
be described as that of one man is a matter of complete indifference to
Aristotle: it might be of one, or seven, or thousands, so long as it ex-
hibited those structural features which he saw as the characteristicform
7 James Redfield speaks of the "personification" of the iipts ("wrath") with
the adjective "destructive," and continues, discussing line 2, "the relative clause
reinforces our sense of the plVLsas a numinous agent"; in "The Proem of the
'Iliad': Homer's Art," ClassicalPhilology, 74 (1979), 101.
8 Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The
Tragedy of Hector (Chicago, 1975),
p. 27.
139
of the genre. We will return to the Odyssey, and to those poems "about
one man." For the moment let us remain with Aristotle's prototype, a
poem whose unity and structure are organic, and do not depend on an
individual, since "one man's actions are numerous and do not make up
a single action" (1451a18 ff.). If we look for a more or less "Aristo-
telian" pattern, a pattern which is not monocentric, in other ancient
epics, where the controversy over the hero is alive and keen, it will not
be on the assumption that Aristotle was a legislator for later practice,
but rather because his insights into Homer ring true, and invite us to
discover whether the epic paradigm that provided those insights may
not prove valuable elsewhere.
Nowhere is there more debate than in the area of Silver Latin epic,
where the Bellum Civile, Thebaid and Punica occasion a diversity of
opinion through having no one central character to take on the role of
"hero." In connection with Lucan, Getty has declared the problem to
be a mirage (pp.xxiv ff.) ; but other discussions of the Bellum Civile
continue to take it for granted that Lucan regarded the norm of epic as
being a poem about a hero,9 just as other discussions of the Thebaid
attribute a similar preconception to Statius, and either blame him for
failing to follow the norm, or praise him for a self-conscious abandon-
ing of the strait-jacket.10With Silius it is the matter of identity alone
that exercises the commentators: Is the hero Hannibal ? Or Scipio ? Or
Rome ?11
Silius's poem most straightforwardly reveals the irrelevance of this
approach. His declared subject is "arma," "arms" (line 1), and he
asks the Muse to allow him to record "what great men and how many
men Rome created for war" (I.3.f.). With such a program concentra-
tion on one man is not compatible. Certainly Hannibal figures promi-
nently: this corresponds to historical fact. It is more important to
realize that Hannibal is particularly prominent in the first ten books as
a result of a structural decision taken by Silius. In an attempt to super-
impose some form on the mass of material before him, Silius has se-
lected the battle of Cannae as the crescendo of the poem. With seven
books before and after, the three "Cannae" books, VIII-X, occupy
the center of the epic; the historical proportion of events is radically dis-
9 See Frederick M. Ahl, Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), pp.
150-56.
10 Blame from L. Legras, Etude sur la ThIbaide de Stace (Paris, 1905), pp.
147 ff., 207. Praise from David Vessey, Statius and the Thebaid (Cambridge,
1973), pp. 55 ff., 317 ff.
11 Discussion, with bibliography, in E. Bassett, "Hercules and the Hero of the
Punica," in The Classical Tradition, ed. L. Wallach (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), pp. 258-
73. Add M. von Albrecht, Silius Italicus: Freiheit und Gebundenheitrbmischer
Epik (Amsterdam, 1964), p. 55.
140
subject, but to "the deeds of men" (Apollonius Rhodius, I.1), and to "straits sailed
through by the sons of gods, and their ship" (Valerius Flaccus, I.lf.). On Apol-
lonius, see J. F. Carspecken, Yale Classical Studies 13 (1952), 110 ft.
142
sort I mean, and the Iliad similarly" (1451a28 ff.). We can only agree
with Aristotle that the unity of the Odyssey resides in its action, its
description of a voUrTO, a "homecoming," with the master of the house-
hold returning home to reestablish the proper order there (1455b 16-
23). It is this action that accommodates the Telemachy and the final
scenes, after the reunion with Penelope. Readers tend to have their eyes
fixed upon the solitary figure of Odysseus, and the passages in the
poem which concern the relations of the family, from Laertes to Tele-
machus, are often felt to be more or less extraneous.15In Virgil's case,
the self-sufficiency of the poem's action is even more evident, although
the same instinct which leads to a search for the unifying hero in the
Silver Epic complacently identifies Aeneas as the guarantor of the
unity of the Aeneid. Richard Heinze most economically states the real
position: "Im Mittelpunkt seines Gedichts steht der Held, von dem es
den Namen tragt, aber nicht er bildet die Einheit, sondern eine Hand-
lung: die t*bersiedelung der Troer oder die Dberffihrung der Penaten
von Troja nach Latium.""16
Such an emphasis as Heinze's redresses the balance for more than
structural considerations, since it is important to treat with circum-
spection the almost automatic assumption that the Aeneid is "about"
Aeneas, that the poem exists as a vehicle for the character. The poem's
first words appear to satisfy this expectation, but we have a corrective
in the note of the ancient commentary known as Servius "auctus" (an
"expanded" version of Servius). According to this commentary, the
beginning of an epic will have the announcement of the subject (pro-
fessiuum), the invocation of the Muse (inuocatiuum), and the start of
the narrative (narratiuum). He continues: "And Virgil takes up the
announcement of the subject in four ways: from the leader ('I sing of
arms and the man,' I.1), from the journey ('who first from the shores
of Troy,' I.1), from the war ('he suffered also much in war,' 1.5), and
from the establishment of the race ('whence comes the Latin race,' 1.6)"
(ed. G. Thilo and H. Hagen, 1,6). The tradition of ancient scholarship
represented in these crabbednotes did not see in the Aeneid's exordium
the announcement of a poem about a man; the subject is greater and
the man serves the subject. As Getty puts it, "the central theme of [the]
Aeneid was not the life of Aeneas, but the fulfilment by Aeneas of his
own destiny in founding the nation which was to become Rome" (p.xx-
vi). This perspective is the truer and the more valuable, for it allows
15 See Dorothea Wender, The Last Scenes
of the Odyssey (Leiden, 1978), pp.
63 ff., for the importance of seeing three generations at Ithaca.
16 Richard Heinze, Virgils epische Technik, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1915), p. 436.
For formal structure, see, besides Heinze's fourth chapter (pp. 436-65), W. A.
Camps, An Introduction to Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford, 1969), Ch. vi, pp. 51-60.
143
due importance to the main agent without allowing him to crowd out
the action: Aeneas is there for the story, not vice versa. Certainly im-
portant elements of what the Aeneid has to say reside in the character
Aeneas, most obviously the demands of the political vocation. But
Aeneas does not embody the meaning of the poem ;17 such a myopic
focus attenuates the extensive power of the Aeneid.18Major sections of
the work are strangely flat and unfruitful if we refer them to Aeneas,
regarding them from a standpoint that looks to Aeneas for significance.
The Roman pageant of Book VI, for example, is there for the reader;
Aeneas is the nominal audience, but however closely we search to find
what it all means for the character, here or later in the poem, the text
yields no more to us than the bald line, " [his father] inflamed his spirit
with a passion for the fame to come" (VI. 889). A. K. Michels has well
criticized the recent attempts, most thoroughly developed by Brooks
Otis, "to see the visit to the underworld as the turning point in Aeneas's
career, the moment at which he abandons the past, and confidently faces
the future, prepared to labour for the greatness of his race which lies
centuries ahead."19As she says, "One would expect that this vision of
the future glory of his race would have some effect on Aeneas, but we
may ask whether in fact it does ... [At] no point after he returns to the
land of the living does Aeneas ever show any recollection of what his
father has revealed to him."20
Otis's idea of a developing Aeneas, with his eventual triumph over
"furor" ("madness"), has come in for some rough handling, and the
current critical tendency is rather to concentrate upon his inability to
master his passions. His enraged killing of Turnus in the final scene
has become the central text of the "pessimistic school," who see the act
as a negation of the poem's earlier celebrations of victorious order and
empire.21 Boyle's words are representative: "Aeneas's final act and
words in the poem are intended to be seen as unequivocal acts of 'furor'
... and the effect of this is to focus the reader's attention once more
upon the nonfulfilment of the imperial ideology and to elicit a final con-
demnation (and a condemnation prefigured many times in the poem) of
17 Brooks Otis's book is representative of the approach which sees the ideas of
the Aeneid concentrated in the figure of Aeneas, Virgil: A Study in Civilised
Poetry (Oxford, 1963), pp. 219 ff.
18 On the "polysemous" nature of the Aeneid, see W. R. Johnson, Darkness
Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), pp. 16-22.
19 "The Insomnium of Aeneas," Classical Quarterly NS 31 (1981), p. 141.
20 Michels, p. 140.
21 Especially influential (but often interpreted too simplistically by later
writers) has been M. C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid (Cambridge, Mass.,
1966), pp. 200 ff. For bibliography, see A. J. Boyle, "The Meaning of the Aeneid,"
Ramus 1 (1972), 90, n. 90. Subsequent references to this paper appear in the
text.
144
the forces of empire and history which Aeneas represents. The death of
Turnus may signify the victory of Aeneas, Rome and her empire, but it
is Vergil's concern to emphasise that it is a victory for the forces of non-
reason and the triumph not of 'pietas' but of 'furor' " (p. 85). Whatever
we decide about the culpability of Aeneas's act,22Boyle here shares with
Otis the misconception that Aeneas is what the poem means, that in the
portrayal of Aeneas is to be found Virgil's whole meaning of empire.
We must resist the centripetal attraction of the chief character and con-
template his last action as one element of what the poem says. Jupiter's
speech in Book I is not obliterated,the significance of the shield in Book
VIII is still potent; the countervailing elements in the Aeneid coexist
and we have to account for them all, not plump for one and shut out the
rest.23
The Odyssey is a rather different matter, for in that poem the medium
for the thematic content, overwhelmingly, is the man himself; in a way
that is not true of'the other epics so far discussed, the Odyssey is indeed
"about" its principal character. Discussions of this aspect of the Odys-
sey prepared the ground for the postclassical development of the "epic
hero," as the critics, allegorizers, and moralists got to work on the
"Everyman" that they discovered in the poem. This path will lead from
the ancient to the medieval world; before following it, we must review
those traditions of ancient epic which deliberately took one individual
as the focus of composition. These are, broadly, the mythological and
the encomiastic.
The first group is now substantially represented only by the unfin-
ished Achilleid of Statius, and by Nonnus's Dionysiaca. Aristotle found
fault with the writers of Heracleids and Theseids for narrating a life
from beginning to end without selection (1451a19 ff.), but lives of
mythological figures were a popular type of poem in many different
periods. Although a single episode might form the subject, the usual
practice, so far as may now be judged, was to celebrate more generally
the deeds of the god or hero. We know of such poems from Pisander in
the seventh century B.C., Panyassis in the fifth, Rhianus and Neopto-
lemus of Parium in the third, Musaeus in the second,24 while in Latin,
there is a Perseis by "a Sicilian," a Heracleid by Carus, and a Diomedia
by lullus Antonius.25 It would be easy to dismiss these lost epics as
following an inferior line of endeavor, but their subject matter alone is
not enough to permit us to judge whether any of them rose above a
22 It is possible to be a good deal less condemnatory: see Camps, p. 29.
23 1 refer once more to Johnson's most illuminating argument, pp. 8 ff.
24 On these
poets, see C. A. Trypanis, Greek Poetry from Homer to Seferis
(London, 1981).
25 Cf.
Ovid, Epistolae ex Ponto IV. xvi. 7 ff., 25; IV. xiii. 11 ff., and Pseudo-
Acro on Horace, Carmina IV. ii. 33.
145
147
acter says of the Iliad and the Odyssey that they were, literally, "com-
posed in the direction of, or with a tendency towards, Achilles and
Odysseus" (363B). The phrasing has an encomiastic color. A similar
preoccupation lies behind the ancient scholiasts' discussions of why the
Iliad was not called the Achilleias." It also lies behind the way in which
the Latin commentator Tiberius Claudius Donatus looks at the Aeneid.
Donatus's analysis of the Aeneid as "laudatiuum,""encomiastic," goes
far beyond Servius's description of Virgil's aims, "to imitate Homer and
to praise Augustus on the basis of his ancestry" (ed. G. Thilo and H.
Hagen, 1, 4). For Donatus, everything in the poem is there for Aeneas:
"Certainly it is encomiastic, but this fact is unrecognised and hidden,
because, while going through the deeds of Aeneas, Virgil is evidently
also assimilating, in an extraordinary variation upon the form of en-
comium, incidental forms of different subject matter-forms which are
nonetheless not alien to the job of encomium; for they are taken up in
order to contribute to the praise of Aeneas" (ed. H. Georgii, I, 2, lines
9 ff; cf. I, 3, 18 ff.). By this time the monocentric view of epos is well on
its way to victory.
For the establishment of that victory in the postclassical world, no
single influence was more important than the central character of the
Odyssey: "Ulysses has placed before us a useful example of what vir-
tue and wisdom can achieve" (Horace, Epistulae I.ii.17 f.). Horace's
characterizationof Homer's purpose finds an echo in Maximus of Tyre,
who describes the Odyssey as "an image of the worthy life and of exact
virtue" (xxvi6b). Such language goes back to the sophist Alcidamas,
an older contemporary of Plato, who described the Odyssey as "a fair
mirror of human life" (quoted by Aristotle, Rhetoric 1406b12). The
allegorizer Heraclitus sees Odysseus as the model of all the virtues,
systematically exemplified one by one.40 The Christian fathers' view of
the Odyssey as an "encomium of virtue" is rooted in the same tradition,
as Hugo Rahner has shown.41 The Odyssey, to these readers, is an
allegory of man's journey through life; as Odysseus encounters and
subdues the range of temptations and threats personified in the Sirens,
the Lotus-Eaters, and Circe, he shows us the triumph of wisdom and
courage over vice, indolence, and resignation.42Here was a fertile field
39Cf. bT scholia on the Iliad's first word, in H. Erbse, Scholia Graeca in
Homeri Iliadem,I (Berlin, 1969), p. 4, lines 30-38.
40 Allhgories d'Homere, ed. F. Buffiere (Paris, 1962), pp. 75 f. On this strand
of criticism, see F. Buffibre,Les Mythes d'Hom re et Ia pensdegrecque (Paris,
1956), pp.365-91.
41 Greek Myths and ChristianMystery, trans. B. Battershaw (London, 1963),
p. 332.
42 Cf. Rahner,pp.281 ff., 328 ff., and Don CameronAllen, MysteriouslyMeant;
The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretationin the Re-
naissance (Baltimore, 1970), pp.90 ff.
148
151
molti ... [D]unque alcuno di loro non basta per se alla vittoria" (p.
163). The action of an epic does not depend on an individual for co-
hesion or form. Tasso has his own understanding of this point: it is not
a puzzling piece of dogma from the Poetics, but an insight into the na-
ture of epic which his reading of classical epic corroborates. Of his own
poem he says, "la favola sia imitazione d'una azione di molti, come e
l'Argonautica di Apollonio, e di Valerio Flacco, e la Tebaide di Stazio,
e come alcuni hanno affermato, che sia l'Iliade d'Omero" (p. 163). This
is a point he had long maintained. In the early stages of his composition
of the Liberata, he had opposed the demands of his critic Speroni, in-
sisting that his action should be "una di molti," not "una di uno."53
Certainly Tasso still takes it for granted that Godfrey is the principal
heroic person in his poem, just as he takes it for granted that Achilles is
in the Iliad, but he tries to keep the relationship between hero and fable
in balance. In a characteristically vivid picture, he compares Achilles'
position in the "body" of the Iliad to that of a Persian king's outsize
hand: "e se il Poema Eroico, siccome parve ad Aristotile, somiglia il
corpo d'un animale, Achille sara in quel corpo simile ad un membro, il
quale non abbia proporzione coll'altre membra, come leggiamo nell'is-
torie, ch'era la mano d'Aria Re de' Persiani" (p. 164).
Tasso's views did not prevail into orthodoxy, although critics con-
tinued to repeat as if by rote the tag about plot being the soul of poetry.54
As the momentum of neoclassicism mounted, the hero bulked ever
larger. As Tillyard puts it: "The type of epic the Renaissance per se
stood for was indeed the heroic, the kind that exhibited a hero who, by
doing great deeds, was a pattern of behaviour to the contemporary
prince or gentleman."55 Some scrupulous readers of Aristotle continued
to insist that the unity of an epic did not depend on the hero. So Ben
Jonson follows Aristotle in criticizing those "that have thought the
Action of one man to be one." He continues: "For though the Argue-
ment of an Epick-Poeme be farre more diffus'd, and powr'd out, then
that of Tragedy; yet Virgil writing of Aeneas hath pretermitted many
things. He neither tells how he was borne, how brought up; how he
fought with Achilles; how he was snatch'd out of the battaile by Venus;
but that one thing, how he came into Italie, he prosecutes in twelve
bookes ... So Homer lai'd by many things of Ulysses and handled no
more, then he saw tended to one and the same end."56Similarly, Pope:
53 See Brand,p. 76.
54 See M. T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criti-
cism,1531-1555(Urbana, Ill., 1946), pp.69 ff., on this motif.
55From his essay "Milton and the English Epic Tradition," in Seventeenth
Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), p. 213. Cf.
John M. Steadman,Milton and The RenaissanceHero (Oxford, 1967), pp. 6 ff.
56Discoveries,ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh,1966), p. 104.
152
"The Unity of the Epic Action, as well as the Unity of the Fable, does
not consist either in the Unity of the Heroe, or in the Unity of Time."57
But the paramount idea remained that an epic necessarily shows an
image of virtue in the figure of the "heroic person." So much, indeed,
Tasso agreed with, but he did not see this as the "esse" of epic, in the
manner represented by the definition of Hobbes, in his "Answer to
Davenant's Preface to Gondibert" (1650) : "He therefore that under-
takes an Heroick Poem, which is to exhibite a venerable & amiable
Image of Heroick vertue ...",8 The word "hero" itself, in its current
literary-critical meaning, was taken over into English surprisingly late
-by Dryden,59who expounded on the French critics such as Le Bossu,
and fixed authoritatively the neoclassical dogma that the epic relates a
great action of "some illustrious hero."'6 In the main tradition of later
English genre criticism, this has usually been taken for granted."1
It was the neoclassical Dryden who originated the controversy over
the question of the hero of Milton's Paradise Lost. He claimed that,
since the hero (Adam) loses and the villain (Satan) wins, it was no
true epic, making his point rather flippantly by saying that Satan was
in reality Milton's hero.62 It would be unhistorical to see in this an
anticipation of the positions of Blake and Shelley; Dryden is not talking
about Milton's commitment to the character, but about his failure to
comply with what Dryden took to be the natural form of epic, a great
hero's accomplishment of a great feat.63 Discussion has gone on ever
since, based on the assumption that a hero is demanded by the form,
that, as E. Sirluck expresses it, "a generic approach enforces the ques-
tion of the identity of the generic hero."64
Yet the present paper is intended to demonstrate that there was
available to Milton an idea of the form and nature of epic in which the
57 Introduction to The Odyssey of Homer, p. 20 of the Twickenham edition
(London, 1967).
58 Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel E. Spingarn (Oxford,
1908), II, 60.
59 In Of Dramatic Poesy (1673), ed. G. Watson (London and New York,
1962), II, 172.
60 "Parallel between Poetry.and Painting," Essays of John Dryden, ed. L. D.
Yonge (London,1882), p. 145.
61 On neoclassical views of the epic hero, see H. T. Swedenberg, The Theory
of the Epic in England, 1650-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1944), pp. 305 ff.;
and P. Hilgin, The Epic Hero and the Decline of Heroic Poetry (Bern, 1964),
Ch. iii.
62 "Dedication to the Aeneis," in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Ox-
ford, 1900), II, 165.
63 C. H. Slater, "Drydenand Addison,"MLR, 69 (1974), 33.
64 Paradise Lost: A Deliberate Epic (Cambridge, 1967), p. 7. A preliminary
guide into the large bibliographyon the hero questionis providedby Steadman,at
the end of his article "The Arming of an Archetype,"in Concepts of the Hero,
cited n.3 above,pp. 192-94.
153
figure of the "generic hero" was not paramount. For Milton, looking
back to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition up to Tasso, it was pos-
sible to see the "esse" of epic as being the imitation of an action. The
frame of this action might take in any number of agents, and the agents
themselves might represent diverse kinds of "heroism,"but the question
at the kernel of the genre was not the neoclassical "What individual is
the center of the poem ?" but rather: "What is the self-sufficient action
which the poem represents ?" This viewpoint forms the basis for Addi-
son's counter to Dryden's remarks about the hero. Addison discusses
Paradise Lost according to what he sees as the canons of Aristotle's
Poetics,65 and he replies, in consequence, "I think I have obviated this
Objection in my first Paper. The Paradise Lost is an Epic, or a Narra-
tive Poem, and he that looks for an Hero in it, searches for that which
Milton never intended."66Addison's dictum is regularly misunderstood.
Hiigin would have it that "for Addison, Paradise Lost is an epic 'with-
out a hero' in the same sense as for Thackeray, for instance, Vanity Fair
is 'a novel without a hero.' "67But Thackeray is writing whimsically or
ironically in the knowledge that a novel ought to have a (morally sig-
nificant) hero, whereas Addison's whole point is that, if you look at
Paradise Lost as an epic on an Aristotelian pattern, you will see that it
requires no hero of the Le Bossu or Dryden order precisely because it
is an epic poem.
It is this "Aristotelian" conception of the genre which provides a
resolution of the dilemma confronting modern scholars when they come
to discuss the "generic hero." The question is no longer as much dis-
cussed as it once was, not because it has been resolved but because the
whole debate now seems unfruitful and even irrelevant. Nonetheless,
when scholars address themselves to the problems of Milton's genre, it
is plain that they still regard the norms of the genre in surprisingly
strict neoclassical terms: the hero posited is the Dryden type, the great
achiever. Very important qualificationsto this approachhave been made
by Steadman-qualifications with which I agree fully. Steadman refers
rather to the language of Italian Renaissance poetics, by which "Adam
would be the 'primary hero' or 'epic person' of Paradise Lost," since he
is "the man whose 'first Disobedience' and 'loss of Eden' are specifically
cited in the first lines of the proposition and constitutethe subject, argu-
ment, and principal action of the poem."68In this matter the emphases
65 Cf. L. E. Elioseff, The Cultural Milieu of Addison's Literary Criticism (Aus-
tin, Tex., 1963), p. 49.
66 Spectator No. 297, 9 February, 1712. The earlier paper is No. 267, 5 January,
1712, where he discusses Paradise Lost as an Aristotelian single, whole, and com-
plete fable.
67 Haigin, p. 153.
68 Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost (Chicago, 1976), p. 8.
154
155
157
158