Epic Encounters: The Modernist Long Poem Goes to the Movies

Most discussions of modern poetry and cinema center on lyric and the avant-garde, but historical epic film offers rich possibilities for teaching the modernist long poem. Historical epic takes us beyond montage and other editing techniques to the DNA of the long poem — a more is more aesthetic that compiles allusions and expands scope. This essay draws on Vivian Sobchack’s poetics of the film genre and Franco Moretti’s analysis of modern literary epic to identify four tendencies in modern American long poems: urban epic (The Waste Land), everyday epic (The Book of the Dead, Paterson), romance epic (Helen in Egypt), and diasporic epic (Omeros). In addition to cross-media comparisons, the essay includes movie posters that undergraduate students made for these long poems.