The chief problem with writing and translating epic poetry in modern times is that of avoiding bombast. This is the problem with translating ancient tragedy too, and so- called “modern tragedy” aside— what is often termed the tragedy of ordinary people— it remains the reason that successful new tragedies are not often written. Bombast drives audiences out of the theater faster than literary mediocrity, poor acting and bathos: it is not itself literary mediocrity so much as antiquarianism, treating a fossilized and long dead emotion as if alive, resuscitating it in the manner of a Hollywood zombie and forcing it to parade about the stage or some other epic arena, strutting and fretting and, because evacuated of life, participating in a tale told by an idiot that seems to mean nothing.

The chief reason for this is that a whole complex of epic emotions, like those evoked by ancient tragedy— what Aristotle thought were released by catharsis— remains unfamiliar to modern audiences. It is unsettling, if not humiliating, to realize that a vibrant emotional reality may now be lost to us, that people may be less complicated, even less visceral and free, than their literary forebears, but such seems to be the case.

At issue here are not just those old chestnuts of fear and pity with regard to tragedy, whatever Aristotle may have meant by obscure terms that remain controversial, or even a glorious defiance of the gods by the exiled hero of an epic poem, but the gods themselves, along with a venerable view of war as a divine enterprise, no matter how ugly, bloodthirsty and catastrophic it might be as well. The mysterious divine– human relations of classical epic and tragedy, with all their rich dimensions, have turned alien if not off- putting. Their ossification, traceable at least as far back as Hamlet, a play that buckles against itself as tragedy, seems to dissolve only on rare occasions in recent years, as with T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, which succeeds because it centers on vital religious convictions.