Something to keep in mind.
Often we grow impatient with epic poems. Too long, we feel—all those irrelevant interruptions, those additions, conventions, invocations, interpolations, those stories and speeches, catalog and dull history. But these are all part of the journey, the reader’s journey on his long way around. For just as there are epic poets, involved in the task of creating, and just as there are epic heroes, who labor to create, so also are there epic readers. And all those digressions and history and stretches of catalog, all those elements of the poem which image the vastness and variety of the real world, allow the epic poet to involve the epic reader in the meaning of the poem, which is the immense difficulty of getting there and the driving necessity to go. The great length of the epic, the vast meandering, is meant to communicate the laborious and perhaps futile effort of the hero and poet to master all the stuff of history and experience. For whether one is an epic protagonist caught in the massive world of contingency, or the epic poet trying to bring order from the chaos of mankind’s memories, or the epic reader trying to get through the long poem, in each case one is attempting to limit the seemingly limitless, striving to control and master the seemingly endless. The reader’s confrontation with the huge poem imitates the epic hero’s confrontation with his vast world, and in both cases man’s need for control and his need for completion are stretched to their utmost.
—A. Bartlett Giamatti, professor of English, President of Yale, and Commissioner of Baseball, in Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene. And speaking of public intellectuals, isn’t something amiss when it seems quaint and old-fashioned, amusingly unlikely, perhaps inefficient, that a professor of English, President of Yale, and critic of epic poetry would also have been Commissioner of Baseball?
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I'm pretty sure that the only thing in my house that would almost qualify as an epic poem is Evan S. Connell's *Notes From A Bottle Found On The Beach At Carmel.* It's pretty good. The only book of Connell's I'd call a serious clunker would be *Double Honeymoon*. And even that would have been okay if it has stopped after the first couple of chapters.