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theme by arguing for the inclusion of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. The case of Gibbon is instructive. In his childhood he had read Pope’s translation of Homer, and Dryden’s translation of Virgil; he was aware of the facility with which English poets could appropriate the epic tradition. In similar fashion he conceived of his
History
as a didactic and exemplary undertaking, and of himself as the true heir of Spenser and of Milton. The epic strain is deeply rooted.
    One central preoccupation, however, might have been taken from Be
owulf
itself—that of a national epic celebrating the foundation and development of the race. Milton wished to “rasp out a British tune” or Arthurian epic before he ever contemplated
Paradise Lost
; Dryden lamented his inability to write an epic upon a national subject, while Pope contemplated a blank verse narrative upon the theme of Brutus and his discovery of Albion. Coleridge had surmised that “I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem,” but then surrendered the idea to Wordsworth, who believed that only epic “can satisfy the vast capacity of the poetic genius.” The epic mood was endemic, therefore. “There is a
chaunt
in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth,” one contemporary noted, “which acts as a spell upon the hearer.” The ancient chant of
Beowulf
is heard across the generations.
    There is also a steadiness and intensity of tone which later poets have inherited. Here is a passage translated from the “Battle of Finnsburh”:
    Around him lay many brave men dying. The raven whirled about, dark and sombre, like a willow leaf. There was a sparkling of blades, as if all Finnsburh were on fire. Never have I heard of a more worthy battle in war.
    Here is a passage from Siegfried Sassoon, on another battle, in “Counter Attack”:
    The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud
    There is the same understated vehemence, the same directness and passion. It is reminiscent of Carlyle’s remark that in the obstinacy and stolidity of the nineteenth-century labourer lay the lineaments of the Saxon warrior. When David Jones invoked his own experiences of the First World War, within
In Parenthesis
, he placed them in the context of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic mythology. As Taine puts the question (of the Anglo-Saxons), “Is there any people which has formed so tragic a conception of life? Is there any which has peopled its infantine mind with such gloomy dreams? . . . Energy, tenacious and mournful energy, an ecstasy of energy—such was the chosen condition.”
    The
poetic life
of approximately four hundred years survives now in only thirty thousand lines, snatched fortuitously from the oblivion of time; they are to be found in four manuscripts, one of them still located in the cathedral library of Vercelli near Milan, where no doubt it was left by a wealthy pilgrim on a journey to Rome. They were transcribed in the latter part of the tenth century, as part of the monastic revival of that period, when the scriptoria of the cathedrals and great monasteries were involved in a programme of educational and administrative reform. It was a question of preserving the inheritance of the race, at a time when its destiny and identity were being threatened by the Norsemen. But if it was a manner of affirming historical identity, it was also an act of piety; the poetic corpus transmitted by the monks was of an overwhelmingly Christian character, thus establishing the visionary religious tradition within all subsequent English poetry. The sacred histories of
Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, Judith, The Fate of the
Apostles, Christ and Satan
all furnish the homiletic material of the later English poets.
    The dates for the composition of these Anglo-Saxon poems cannot now be ascertained and we may hazard any