Homeric similes compare two unlike things to bring out aspects of a character or event.What is an Epic Simile? Homer is a semi-legendary figure who composed two of the greatest poems known to history: The Iliad, about the ten-year-long Trojan War, and The Odyssey, which relates the war...
A rhetoric of jump cuts, voice-overs, and tracking shots serves this end neither better nor worse than do similes and epithets. Celluloid classicism works increasingly from a pantheon of Eisenstein. Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock. Godard, Truffaut. Yet, as in the literary tradition, such reflexivity...
Many of these beginin medias res, in the middle of the story, and may digress into the past later on in the poem. There are many journeys into the underworld. There are grand battle-scenes punctuated by extended similes, ambitious analogies that stretch the imagination but strive for literar...
His similes are clearly modelled on those of Apollonius and Homer but, unlike theirs, are integrated with the whole poem in virtue of their association with leitmotifs that recur at pivotal moments of the action. 145 See also Galinsky (1996, 229-231), who discusses a number of mythical ...
the Iliad and Odyssey of the Greek Homer, and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. The “literary” or “secondary” epics were composed by sophisticated craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form. Of this kind is Virgil’s Latin poem the Aeneid, which later served as the chief model...
similesthe strain of heroic action is relieved by theilluminatingintrusion of a quite different and often peaceful contemporary world, in images developed often almost longingly beyond the immediate point of comparison. Thesesimiles, in their placing and their detail at least, surely depend on the ...
Milton also employs other elements of a grand style, most notablyepic similes. These explicit comparisons introduced by “like” or “as” proliferate acrossParadise Lost. Milton tends to add one comparison after another, each one protracted. Accordingly, in one long passage in Book 1, Satan’s...