The Works Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning The Battle Of Marathon 1820 An Essay On Mind With Other Poems 1826 From Prometheus Bound And Miscellaneous Poems 1833 From The Seraphim And Other Poems 1838 Poems Before Congress 1860 Other Previously Published Prose And Poetry PDF Download

The Battle of Marathon - A poem written in early youth - Elizabeth Barrett Browning with an introduction by H Buxton Forman - The Battle of Marathon is a rhymed, dramatic, narrative-poem by Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning). Written in 1820, when Barrett was just 14, it retells powerfully The Battle of Marathon: during which the Athenian state defeated the much larger invading force during the first Persian invasion of Greece. When Darius the Great orders his immense army march west to annex additional territories; no-one in the Persian court predicted that some fractious, independent Greek city-states stood any chance against the Persian super-power. And yet at Marathon in 490BC, Darius' plans received a decisive check in the brilliant Athenian offensive overseen by the aged but hardy Miltiades: who overran the Persian army just landed upon their coasts, cutting their opponents down to the last man. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer until I dreamt oftener of Agamemnon than of Moses the black poney. And thus my 'great epic' of eleven or twelve years old, in four books and called the 'Battle of Marathon, ' and of which fifty copies were printed because Papa was bent upon spoiling me; is a Pope's Homer done over again.. or rather undone; for although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope's Homer threw me into Pope on one side, and into Greek on the other and into Latin as a help to Greek - and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my essay on mind, - a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented of as worthy of all repentance.