Epic Characteristic 3 The hero does great deeds in battle or undertakes an extraordinary journey or quest. Epic Characteristic 2 The setting is broad and often includes supernatural realms, especially the land of the dead. By the end of this essay, then, it will become clear that The Prelude, which many scholars consider to be extending Milton's epic turn inward in Paradise Lost, depends far more upon the physical realm, and ability, than previously believed. Epic Characteristic 1 The hero is a great leader who is identified strongly with a particular people or society.

But more importantly, it is Wordsworth's commentary on how one can most successfully participate in the natural world that definitively excludes physically-othered individuals from achieving even a romanticized iteration of heroic status. As in the works of poetic forbears, disabled characters nearly derail Wordsworth from his epic project-the development of the poet's mind via the instruction of nature. Although an epic may be either a folk original (primary), passed on for centuries through the oral tradition, or imitative and literary (secondary, it must be unified in plot and action, and not episodic like Dante's Commedia. Indeed, the poet's consistent stigmatization of disability coupled with an equally persistent insistence that physical ability is fundamental to his epic endeavor situates The Prelude more squarely within the epic tradition than previously noticed. An extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, celebrating the feats of a legendary or traditional hero. This is a divide that as of yet has not been properly explicated, and one which I attribute to the shift in genre, from lyric to epic, which superimposes onto The Prelude pre-drawn battle-lines between the virile hero and the sluggishly-monstrous, aberrant creatures who stand in his way.

be assumed to have fallen out of the folk epic frame of reference). Although scholars addressing William Wordsworth's shorter lyrics have traditionally praised his positive treatment of physical otherness, at least one commenter writing on The Prelude correctly characterizes Wordsworth's depiction of disabled individuals as 'demonic' (Curran 184). in determining the epic's meaning than scholarly theories on the literary.

Folk epic definition for dummies