The Metamorphoses of Ovid

The mark of success in a poet's career, writes David Slavitt, was an epic that might stand on the shelf alongside Virgil's. But how was a poet like Ovid, with a more intimate, livelier, funnier and more self-mocking sensibility, to attempt such a thing? The epic form was not, I think, immediately congenital, and my guess is that Ovid recognized this himself. Accordingly, he transformed the epic, playing against its grain a lot of the time, and escaping its severe organizational and thematic demands by transforming it into something altogether different. The first metamorphosis, then, is of the idea of the epic itself.