The almost complete disregard of the verse epic as a genre still worthy of meaningful discussion and earnest investigation is all too apparent in German literary criticism. The only attempt to view the genre in its evolution through the centuries is Heinrich Maiworm's valuable but necessarily somewhat perfunctory historical survey of the German epic which appeared in the second volume of Deutsche Philologie im Auf, iss. There is as yet, however, no literary study of the German verse epic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period which is of particular interest to such a study and...