Explore "Destruction of Jerusalem" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic / poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all / Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would / be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated / and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous / difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage / of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for / the old mythology, _incredulus odi; _ and yet there must be a mythology, or / a _quasi_-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion / of the prophecies -- the termination of the first revealed national religion / under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and / condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would / have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the / completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! / _venturum expectat_.