The Flaiming Terrapin and valley of thousand hills: campbell, Dholmo and the "Brief Epic". pp.449 - 466.

'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 Campell's he 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: Edhlomo's is Wordswortjian, 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 contibuting to south African literature as a conherent order.