Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/285

 VIII

Thomas Hardy wrote The Dynasts, no poet had attempted to fashion into one great poem the epic story of the Napoleonic wars. There had been odes, lyrics, sonnets, narrative and didactic poems innumerable on Waterloo and other famous battles by land and sea, on dramatic or sentimental episodes in the fighting, on the aims or personality of the Emperor himself, but the theme as a whole had seemed too vast, too complex even for epic treatment, and had been left to the plodding Muse of History. Nor has Hardy welded it all into anything like another Iliad; there is something 229