Epopee culture
The learned epic poem, heroic poem epic poem, is a literary genre western, narrative and extensive, written in verse (usually endecasílabo in real octaves). Celebrate some elevated, patriotic or religious subject, usually a war or a journey (also in the form of conquest, religious sacrifice or singular combat). It is distinguished from the medieval epic or songs of gesta in which its transmission is not oral but written, and in that its elaboration is due to educated poets formed in the Greco-Roman cultural tradition from the Renaissance until the XVIII century. All the educated epics imitate more or less directly the two classic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, or the one of Virgilio, that is also an imitation of them, the Aeneid. It has two subgenres: the burlesque epic poem and the allegorical epic poem or psychomaquia. Although in the Middle Ages there were already learned epics such as Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, which inspired other poems such as the Labyrinth of Fortune by Juan de Mena or Ponça's Comedieta by Don Inigo López de Mendoza, his patron was formed in the sixteenth century during the Renaissance, in Italy, with the poems of Luigi Pulci (Morgante), Mateo Boyardo (Orlando inamorato) and Ludovico Ariosto (Orlando furioso), and later with Torcuato Tasso (La Jerusalem liberada), who was the first in modern theorizing about the genre by configuring its characteristics in the first of its Discorsi dell'arte poetico ed in particolare sopra il epic poem (Venice, 1587), inspired by the canon of Ferrara established by the furious Orlando of Ludovico Ariosto. In Portugal highlights the Lusiadas, Camoens. In France, but already in the eighteenth century, La Henriada de Voltaire. In England they especially emphasize The Paradise lost and the Paradise recovered of John Milton.
In Spain cultivated this genre many poets, among which stand out especially in the fifteenth century the aforementioned Marqués de Santillana (Comedieta de Ponza); in the XVI Luis Luis Zapata (famous Carlo), Juan Rufo (the Austriada), Cristóbal de Virués, author of the Monserrate and, above all, Alonso de Ercilla, author of La Araucana; in the XVII, Diego de Hojeda, author of La Cristiada; Lope de Vega, author of La Dragontea, The Jerusalem conquered and the beauty of Angélica), and Bernardo de Balbuena with El Bernardo or The defeat of Roncesvalles. Bibliography
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