Carlyle and Contemporary Theories of Epic and Its Origins in Lyric Poetry

Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

[Home —> Authors —> Thomas Carlyle —> Works —> Carlyle and the Search for Authority]

[Chapter 3, note 27, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

The phrase "songs and rhapsodies" was used to describe the Iliad by Richard Bentley in 1713 and became a commonplace in later Homeric studies (cited in Myres, 49-1 see also Dale, Victorian Critic, 81-82, esp. n. 36). Henry Hart Milman, citing Henry Nelson Coleridge's comparison between the Robin Hood legends and the Homeric poems, complained that Homer's epics were being turned into a "minstrelsy of the Grecian border" (124-25). Carlyle read Ritson's Fairy Tales and Ancient Songs and Ballads in 1831 (TNB, 213)

Contents last modified 5 October 2001