This book is a comparative study of three poets - Vergil, Dante and Milton - and their use of, and defenses against, the epic tradition. A study in intertextuality, it is also a work of literary history, discussing the strategies of incorporation each poet uses in coming to terms with the literary past of his genre.
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The work is an examination of creative process, of the primal meditation that makes textual beginnings possible in the first place. Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Commedia, and Milton's Paradise Lost alla begin by meditating on the underworld, the land of the dead. Ronald Macdonald argues that this meditation is a crucial episode in the creative process, in which each poet grapples with his literary inheritance, without being forced simply to repeat that inheritance. He thus shows the underworld to be analogous too the unconscious: the journey there is seen as liberating the poet from repressed material which would otherwise dictate his thought. Macdonald ingeniously demonstrates how characteristic strategies of incorporating the past emerge for each poet, with Vergil "foregrounding" his historical epic against the ahistorical bardic corpus of Homer, Dante "including" the past Whole by internalizing the figure of Vergil, and Milton "displacing" the predecessor in the place of priority with the tropic maneuver Harold Bloom has called "metalepsis". Paradise Lost is then seen as the culmination and termination of the epic tradition, a foreclosure of the possibility of further development in the genre.
