ABSTRACT
John Steinbeck was deeply moved by epic poetry. He knew that the postclassical poets had entered the portals of a progressively narrowing passageway in which the freedoms enjoyed by Homer were forced to move in the ever more limited space of the poet’s awareness of his own historical relativity, which has the power to curtail inspiration and grandiose language. The world had thus created poems which were ever less epic: national poems, cantonal poems, provincial poems, poems no longer of epochs, but of generations. They grew ever more distant from the grandeur of the human being, since they rendered the greatness of that person at that moment; ever more distant from the epic sense of tragedy, since they recounted the victory of a good over an evil, whereas the essence of tragedy lies in the awareness that the human being is always enmeshed in both.
