Obviously it is impracticable to undertake here even a brief summary of the history of English narrative poetry and of the influences to which it has been responsive. Something may, nevertheless, be done to map out roughly a few divisions which may be of assistance in bringing this material into orderly shape for the student. Many efforts at systematic classification have been made, and a few fairly well-marked types have been defined. In spite of this fact, the task still presents insuperable obstacles over which there has been futile controversy. One type is likely to run into another in a way which is uncomfortably baffling. Then there are numerous nondescript works whose proper place seems determinable by no law of poetics. The fact is that, here at least, narrow distinctions are bound to be unsatisfactory. The critic finds it imperative to avoid dogmatism lest he lay himself open to attack; his only refuge is in the general statement which may be suggestive even if it is not exact. Of the fixed types, two of the best known, the _Epic_ and the _Ballad_, were among the earliest to be created. The Epic in its original form was a long poem of uniform metre, serious in tone and elevated in style, introducing supernatural or heroic characters and usually dealing with some significant event in racial or national history. In its first or primitive shape it was anonymous, a spontaneous outgrowth of popular feeling, though perhaps arranged and revised at a later date by some conscious artistic hand. Such a primitive Epic is the old English _Beowulf_: it is thoroughly objective; in it no clew to definite authorship can be detected; in it personality is buried in the rush of incident and the clash of action. When, with the broadening of the scope of poetry, the individual writer displaced the tribe as the preserver of folk-lore, the new order of things evolved the so-called artificial Epic as represented by Milton's _Paradise Lost_. Here the conventional Epic style and material is kept; the universe is the stage, and the figures upon it are imposing and grand; but behind the poem is a single personality whose mood colors and modifies the whole. The Epic is no longer entirely racial or national, but individual; and we have the introduction of such passages as Milton's reference to his own blindness in Book Three. Akin to the Epic is the Mock Epic, which appropriates the Epic machinery and Epic style to use them in dealing with trivialities. In Pope's _The Rape of the Lock_, the most artistic Mock Epic in English, the theft of a single lock of hair becomes an act of national and supernatural interest and a game of cards is described as if it were a mighty battle.