AustLit

'This essay poses some questions about the twentieth-century's experience of the longing for Epic, and a concomitant discursive style which was traditionally characteristic of Epic, as for other long poems. I shall ask those questions in terms of shared attitudes to a traditional Western European classical heritage in what used to be called the translation studii, the passage from one location, one language, to another. In this movement, this translation from one place to another, I shall consider location, location, location, comparing the voices and choices of A. D. Hope and Derek Walcott in order to test some of our literary-critical, and perhaps also social, assumptions about those longings, those locations, those attitudes' (60).