Our book today is John Gardner’s 1973 epic poem Jason & Medeia, and it … screeching halt, right? Yes, “epic poem” – a literary form about as dead as the dodo, an intentionally, defiantly recherche choice for any modern-day author to make, a thumb in the eye of prospective new readers, a pretentious fling of the scarf over the shoulder, a way – perhaps the most signature way – for pedants to advertise their time-shares on Mount Helicon. Western literature was born in the epic poem, and it was refined to adulthood in the epic poem, and it colonized the barbarians in the epic poem, and it reconciled the ways of God to man in the epic poem … and then it unanimously and resolutely left the epic poem behind, or else consigned it to one ratty shelf at the Grolier Book Shop.

And yet, epic poems continue to get written, and some of them continue to be great. Anthony Burgess never managed that, despite a couple of tries (and the less said about Melville’s Clarel the better), but a handful of other authors have – Derek Walcott’s Omeros comes to mind, of course, and Kenneth Koch’s Ko, and W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs. There’s Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, which is almost as lumbering as Burgess but much more heartfelt, and more recently there’s Campbell McGrath’s Shannon, one of those books that seems to age and marinate in the mind’s back rooms, ‘improving’ as time goes on.

And there’s Jason & Medeia, born of its author’s life-long love of the classics (they’re liberally quoted throughout, especially Apollonius of Rhodes and Euripides), telling the story of Jason and the Argonauts and the terrifying self-inflicted tragedy of Medeia, ranging over the whole landscape of the Homeric world, stopping now to admire a shield, now to take the reader into the heart of a hot battle:

We lashed torches to our spears and hurled. The city went up

like oil. Ye gods but we were good at it! Mad Idas shrieked,

dancing with a female corpse. Leodokos, strong as a bull,

pushed in the palace doors and we saw white fire inside.

And one struck at my left, and I whirled, and even as the spear

plunged in, I saw his face, his helmet fallen away:

Kyzikos! He sank without a word, and when his muscles jerked

and his head tipped up, there was sand in his open eyes. Too late

for shamed explanations now; too late to consider again

the warning of the seer! He’d had his span: one more bird caught

in the wide, indifferent net. Nor was he the only one.

And of course presiding over all of it are the gods and goddesses on Olympus, who talk frankly not only with Gardner’s bespectacled stand-in but also with each other, as contentious and direct as always. When Hera accuses Athena of caring only for abstraction, of putting obstacles in Jason’s path out of mere whim, Athena’s ventured defense has bitter, contemporary resonances. Her reply is in part about Vietnam, but Homer would have recognized it in an instant just the same:

… You’re wrong, this once, to reproach me, Goddess.

I do know the holiness of things. I know as well as you

the hungry raven’s squawk in winter, the hunger of nations,

the stench of gotch-gut wealth, how it feeds on children’s flesh.

I’ve pondered kings and ministers with their jackals’ eyes,

presidents sweetly smiling with the hearts of wolves. I’ve seen

the talented well-meaning, men not chained to greed,

able to sacrifice all they possess for one just cause,

fearless men, and shameless, earnestly waiting, lean,

ready to pounce when the cause is right – waiting, waiting -

while children die in ambiguous causes, and wicked men

make wars – waiting – waiting for the wars to reach their streets,

waiting for some unquestionable wrong – waiting on graveward …

Precisely because of all that I’ve done what I’ve done, raised men

to test this lord of the Argonauts. I have never failed him

yet, and I will not now; but I mean to annoy him to conflict,

badger till he racks his brains for proof he believes, himself,

of his worthiness. I mean to change him, improve him, for love

of Corinth, Queen of Cities. You speak of Space and Time.

No smallest grot, O Queen, can shape its identity

outside that double power: a thing is its history,

the curve of its past collisions, as it locks on the moment. What force

it learned from yesterday’s lions is now mere handsel in the den

of the dragon Present Space. And therefore I raise opposition

to Jason’s will, to temper it. His anguine mind,

despite those rueful looks, will find some way.

John Gardner is remembered today exclusively for his school-friendly novella Grendel, and even if his wise, garrulous, witty novels were to enjoy a rediscovery, it’s doubtful Jason & Medeia would be invited along for the ride, and that’s a shame. Exotic it might now be (long narrative poems were disappearing from the literary landscape even while Longfellow was writing some of the most exquisite ones every created, and he knew it, and he himself disappeared from the literary landscape not long after), but it’s not recondite at all – as one or two critics appreciated at the time, the book is on many levels a boisterous, fascinating novel, only raised to the pitch of poetry (one of those critics, nudged by the author himself, even seemed to realize that this holds true for all epic poems: they exist to tell stories, not to be willfully opaque like the most diseased of their modern offspring). The Jason story has had countless re-tellings over the centuries, and Jason & Medeia stands with the best of them.