![]() ![]() But by the time Paradise Lost was finished in 1667, the surprise wasn't so much that Milton had written a good epic, but that he had managed to write an epic at all. In the Poetics, Aristotle named epic poetry as the summit of the artistic impulse, and as late as Dante in the 14th century, with the Renaissance revival of classical learning, this remained the accepted view. ![]() Still, at the end of 1988, a 28-year-old Englishman published a comic-book series called The Sandman, and it meant something-something about the fading conviction that traditional fiction was the highest path, the greatest art.Įven the most powerful cultural commitments to an art-form can change, of course. There's a lot of ruin in an art-form, and the novel, with its sneer of cold command, yet gazes out on the world of art it claims to dominate. ![]() Publishers didn't fold up their businesses and steal away into the night. Novelists didn't forget that book-length fiction was one of the central devices by which modern times tried to explain itself to itself. At least, none of it is true in the sense of being the actual particulars, the genuine facts on the ground. ![]()
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