In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957) Northrop Frye asserts that Homer established for his successors the "demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic," and that with this "objective and disinterested element," the epic acquired an authority based "on the vision of nature as an impersonal order." The epic was ranked by Aristotle as second only to tragedy, and by many Renaissance critics as the highest of all genres. Paradise Lost in turn became, in the Romantic Period, a model for John Keats' fragmentary epic Hyperion, as well as for William Blake's several epics, or "prophetic books" ( The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem), which translated into Blake's own mythic terms the biblical narrative that had been Milton's subject. Of this kind is Virgil's Latin poem the Aeneid, which later served as theĬhief model for Milton's literary epic Paradise Lost (1667). "Literary epics" were composed by individual poetic craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form. (See oral formulaic poetry.) Among these are the Iliad and Odyssey that the Greeks ascribed to Homer the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf the French Chanson de Roland and the Spanish Poema del Cid in the twelfth century and the thirteenth-century German epic Nibelungenlied. Traditional epics (also called "folk epics" or "primary epics") were written versions of what had originally been oral poems about a tribal or national hero during a warlike age. There is a standard distinction between traditional and literary epics. That meets at least the following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or in the instance of John Milton's Paradise Lost) the human race. "In its strict sense the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work
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