The Flaming Terrapin and Valley of a Thousand Hills: Campbell, Dhlomo and the ‘Brief Epic’*

Abstract

‘Epic’ is a controversial category in the study of both oral record and performance and literature in South Africa, although the form has achieved a variety of manifestations. This article examines two early twentieth-century South African poems, Roy Campbell's The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and Herbert Dhlomo's Valley of a Thousand Hills: A Poem (1942), arguing that both can be identified as ‘brief epic’, a form crucial to modernism. While both are post-Romantic, the two poets engage with the form in different ways: Dhlomo's is Wordsworthian, while Campbell's tends to the neo-Miltonic and is part of early modernism's re-discovery of myth. As regards the communal energy of epic, Dhlomo's poem is national in its implications, while Campbell's is mundane and individualistic. Yet the co-incidence of form and mode, as well as the poets’ historical contiguity, suggest that both may be read as contributing to South African literature as a coherent order.