Thus maybe the encyclopedic or didactic aspects of epic (the catalog of ships; Pound's lectures; Dante's or Joyce's grids of correspondences) are secondary to, or subsumed by, a PLOT, a personal story, the shadow of the hero or the anti-hero or the poet. Why? because poetry is a voracious force-field, a conjunction of opposites, a conjunction of word & flesh, knowing & being. This is the telos or aim of its powerful energies : embodiment.

This vortex or vanishing point of poetry, where knowing & being, soul & body meet in the pleroma of the word.

& the epic becomes the "personal epic", the tale of the tribe becomes the mirror of the person, the microcosm, the reader.

What is the paradigm for this literary shape? It is "incarnational". The paradigm is the Gospels, where the telos of history is the Person, and God incarnate returns like Odysseus as the alpha-omega of the entire Scriptural-historical process.