Galeano is a sadly overlooked writer in the UK. The world is a scary, messy place, but it’s always worth being in it – Milton thought so, and I agree. To me, this is a moment to be celebrated: this is when Adam and Eve become fully human. “The world was all before them”, and they make their way into it “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow”. I love the subversively hopeful image at the end of Book 12, when Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden. He deliberately reprised many of the classical epics that had come before him, and I love how his poem is in such open conversation with so many of its predecessors. Milton wanted to write a native epic for England, and the story of Adam and Eve is the result. Below are just a few of my favourite epics – which I have been deliberately playful in defining as such. Writers too numerous to name have co-opted and wrestled with the epic tradition. Although it is a long poem, Amnion offers (or at least, such is my hope) a form of anti- or counter-epic: it is an attempt to honour a fractured family history and give it its due weight. My book Amnion is an attempt to challenge many of these aspects of the epic. I am fascinated by the nation-building aspect of epic, not to mention its masculine, martial traditions it is something in which I, a woman of mixed cultural heritage, felt I had no place. And epic has historically been a very top-down genre: nationalistic (the Aeneid), featuring heroes whose valour and virtue are validated by their high birth (King Arthur, Beowulf, even Aragorn in Lord of the Rings). They’re some of the most famous texts in western literature. These are great, familiar stories, retranslated and adapted again and again.
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