It is a quiet era for the epic. The grand, sweeping narratives that once defined civilizations—the clangor of Trojan shields, the wanderings of Odysseus, the theological architecture of Dante—have largely retreated into the silence of libraries. We live in an age that prefers the rapid-fire dopamine of the screen to the sustained, architectural discipline of the canto. Yet, James Sale’s HellWard, the first volume of his English Cantos, arrives not as a relic, but as a challenge. It suggests that the epic is not dead; it was merely waiting for a poet brave enough to descend into the underworld again.
The cover of HellWard by James Sale
The Secular Silence
To understand the audacity of HellWard, one must first acknowledge the void it fills. The modern shift from poetry to prose, and from literacy to the audio-visual, has stripped our cultural storytelling of its metaphysical weight. We have traded the Age of Heroes for the Age of Zeroes.
Consider the treatment of Beowulf. The original Anglo-Saxon poem is a tension wire stretched between pagan fate and Christian hope, where the hero acknowledges God’s guidance in the darkness of the fen. Contrast this with the 2007 film adaptation, where divinity is replaced by digital flesh, and the hero laments that “The Christ God has killed” the time of heroes. This is the secular lens: it views chivalry as toxic and sanctity as weakness. In this climate, writing a traditional epic is an act of rebellion.
A Modern Descent
James Sale does not simply mimic the past; he reinvigorates the terza rima, that interlocking three-line chain Dante forged to climb out of Hell. It is a notoriously difficult form in English, yet Sale uses it to drive a narrative that is claustrophobically modern.
His Hell is not a medieval pit of pitchforks. It is a hospital ward. The torture here is psychological, the atmosphere sterile and terrifying. The protagonist’s journey begins not in a dark wood, but in the shadow of cancer, where the biological crisis triggers a spiritual one. The terror is familiar, smelling of antiseptic and regret.
Sale acknowledges his debt to the Florentine master but marks the difference immediately. The poet-narrator is told:
‘This modern world’, he grimaced, ‘truth to tell,’
Is not the same as Florence was back then;
It’s different, though stamped and marked as hell.
The evil here is insidious. It is not always violent; often, it is merely bureaucratic or intellectual. It is the banality of a boss who speaks “robotically,” viewing his own reflection in his shoe-leather as the summit of existence.
The Architecture of Error
What distinguishes HellWard is its diagnosis of sin. In Sale’s topography, the deepest hells are reserved for intellectual errors—the “well-intentioned” ideas that lead millions astray. The poem is merciless with false prophets. We encounter politicians and poets who have failed their calling.
There is a biting satire in Canto 9, where the poet meets “The Bliar,” a grinning figure representing the political deception of the Iraq War era. Deeper still, we find the “poetasters”—those who degraded language itself. Figures resembling Ginsberg howl in incoherent misery, having contracted “Nimrod’s curse,” the confusion of tongues.
This is the “Information Gain” of the poem: the connection between the degradation of language and the degradation of the soul. When words lose their meaning, reality fractures.
Beauty in the Broken
Sale’s technique mirrors his subject. He employs near-rhymes and imperfect chimes—breaker/beaker, sight/weight—creates a sonic landscape that feels slightly fractured. Some purists might demand the perfect ringing bells of exact rhyme, but in a poem about a broken, fallen world, the discordance feels intentional. It is the sound of a “drab cult” worshipping itself.
Yet, there are moments of sublime interception. The muse Calliope, along with Nemesis and Athena, weaves through the narrative, harmonizing Athens and Jerusalem. The grammatical complexity—sentences unspooling across multiple stanzas—creates a sensation of rushing headlong toward a destiny that cannot be paused.
The Long Game of Fame
Critics might argue that an epic poem in the twenty-first century is a shout into a void. Who reads poetry now, let alone a theological trilogy?
But canonization is a slow, unpredictable process. When Dante died, he was an exile, while his contemporary Albertino Mussato was paraded through the streets of Padua with trumpets and crowns of ivy. Today, Mussato is a footnote, and Dante is a universe.
HellWard offers a constructive philosophy in a time of deconstruction. It rejects the nihilism that pervades modern literature, offering instead a rugged, difficult path toward meaning. It may take time for the culture to catch up to James Sale, but literature plays a long game. For now, we have the poem: a terrifying, beautiful, and necessary map of the modern soul.
The cover of HellWard by James Sale
