The 20 Greatest Epic Poems Ever Written

Humanity's oldest surviving long poem, written on clay tablets four thousand years before paper — the source of every later story about a hero confronting his own death.

Homer founded Western literature in this poem, a portrait of human rage so exact that no later epic — from Virgil to Tolstoy — has escaped its shadow.

The original journey narrative — its word entered every European language, and its plot architecture still structures storytelling from Joyce to Pixar three thousand years later.

Virgil's national epic legitimized Rome to itself and gave the Christian Middle Ages its template for poetic seriousness — Dante's chosen guide through hell.

Dante invented the Italian literary language to write this poem, and in doing so produced the most ambitious vision of the afterlife ever composed.

Milton's twelve-book epic of the Fall — the last great work in the Homeric tradition and the most ambitious poem ever written in English.

Ovid's two-hundred-and-fifty-tale Latin poem of mythological transformations — the single most influential source of imagery for European art and literature for two thousand years.

Ferdowsi's sixty-thousand-couplet epic preserved Persian language and identity through three centuries of Arab rule — Iran's national poem and the longest epic ever written by a single author.

Tolkien's trilogy invented modern fantasy as a genre — a fully imagined world with its own languages and twenty centuries of history, still the most popular novel of the twentieth century.

Lucretius's Latin verse treatise on Epicurean atomism — rediscovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, it helped ignite the Renaissance and still startles with its modernity.

The greatest surviving work of Old English literature — an eighth-century epic that Tolkien's 1936 essay rescued from the philologists and restored to the canon.

Camões's 1572 epic turned Vasco da Gama's voyage to India into a new Aeneid — the supreme literary monument of the Portuguese Age of Exploration.

Hesiod's genealogy of the Greek gods — the mythological framework on which all Greek literature was built, and the text Herodotus said gave the Greeks their religion.

Pound's lifelong attempt at a modern epic — multilingual, encyclopedic, sometimes crazy, sometimes sublime; Pound was also the midwife of every major modernist other than himself.

Brecht's 1941 epic theatre masterwork — the anti-war play that invented the alienation effect and shaped twentieth-century drama, film, and political rhetoric.

Neruda's 1950 epic poem of the Americas — a political and geographical hymn from the Andes to the Caribbean; probably the most ambitious Latin American poem of the twentieth century.

Walcott's 1990 Caribbean reimagining of Homer — Saint Lucian fishermen as Hector and Achilles, postcolonial epic at its peak; the work that sealed Walcott's 1992 Nobel.

Mistral's twelve-canto Provençal poem — single-handedly elevated Provençal from a peasant dialect back into a literary language; 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Saint-John Perse's epic Anabasis and selected lyrics — translated into English by T.S. Eliot, who also championed the book that eventually won the 1960 Nobel.

Martinson's 1956 science-fiction epic poem — refugees drifting on a lost spaceship from a devastated Earth; the 1974 Nobel (shared) and the strangest Swedish modernist work.