The Island

 An interesting piece in The Critic by Jaspreet Singh Bopari rightly deplores the sad fact that Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in English, 'seems to be fading slowly from public view', seldom even being taught in schools, let alone read. He also laments the failure of subsequent English poets to come up with any kind of satisfactory national epic: even Tennyson and Browning, perhaps the two best equipped to do it, only managed the sonorous 'private fantasies' of Idylls of the King, and the magnificent but undeniably Italian The Ring and the Book. With the coming of modernism, all hope was of course lost.
   However, there was one wholehearted attempt at an English national epic – The Island by Francis Brett Young, a work now so completely forgotten that Bopari doesn't mention it. I only know it because it was a great favourite of my father, who read it repeatedly. The Island is a rousingly patriotic verse history of Britain, from the Bronze Age to the Battle of Britain – just the kind of thing to appeal to my history-loving, deeply patriotic father. Published in 1944, it was a huge success, the first edition (of 23,500) selling out immediately – an extraordinary feat in wartime conditions – and numerous reprints following. Up until then, Francis Brett Young had been a successful middle-brow novelist, author of, among other things, a string of 'Mercian novels', set in and celebrating the West Midlands. Sadly, soon after the publication of The Island, his frail health deteriorated and his writing career was effectively over. He died in 1954 in Cape Town, and his ashes are buried in Worcester cathedral.
  Here is an Arthurian passage from The Island –

…. And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend – What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.

Which was the spirit of Britain – that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered when all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius – no man knows his name –
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
Or where they fell – whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

Well, it's not Milton, or even Miltonic – but epic it surely is, and absolutely English.