Epic demands that exposition be subordinated to dramatic human action. The epic poet can make extensive use of speeches and narrative, killing the birds of exposition and character revelation with one stone. In offering the poet the freedom to put words into the mouths of characters and into the mouth of an omniscient narrator, the genre gives the poet the tools necessary to expound a theme and to create a drama. Within those narrative limitations, the modern epic poet might well be able to create a dramatic narrative that showed how statistical probabilities have come to affect the quality of life as lived by the man in the street. But the audience ought not be expected to have --or be willing to acquire-- an actuary's knowledge in order to understand that theme. There is rarely if ever a need for any abstruse technicality, raw and undigested, itself to become the subject matter of the poem; when that happens, the artist is not making a poem but passing an owl-pellet. Tim Romano Carlo Parcelli wrote: >[...] >Nash's work is tremendously influential and has broad application. Nash's work >along with Heisenberg's, Bohr's, Pitts' (another good melodrama) and >McCulloch's, Watson's and Crick's, von Neumann's, Turing's, Weiner's, >Shannon's >and dozens of others forms the theoretical and practical bedrock of our daily >lives. Can the consumer of 'epics' only explore this as melodrama, ghosted >forces that make self-interest possible, or in simple allegories of good and >evil? If not through the Cantos, Maximus, "A" etc., how else would such an >ambitious and risky poetics proceed? Carlo Parcelli