La Victoria de Santa Anna : THE ALAMO.<i> By Michael Lind</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 351 pp., $25</i>

Although the epic poem holds pride of place in literature--the Babylonian “Epic of Gilgamesh,” for example, dates from about 2000 BC--its stature in the literary family has been much reduced. Our times are more notable for protesting than for singing of arms and the man.

Every few years, to be sure, new and best-selling translations of “The Divine Comedy,” “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” or “The Aeneid” appear, but there are disturbing signs that even these recycled classics, are being relegated to the attic, if not the dust bin. When major universities make the study of Shakespeare and Milton optional, what chance have Dante, Homer and Virgil? Ironically, however, so-called multiculturalism, while dooming two dead white English males, might turn out to be the salvation of two Italians and a Greek, even if their works are pillars of a much-maligned Eurocentric culture.

It was not always so. Most reasonably educated people of a certain age recall reading and memorizing sections of “Paradise Lost,” “Canterbury Tales” and “Beowulf.” There were also more accessible long poems such as “Idylls of the King,” “Evangeline” and even “Song of Hiawatha.” And while the above-mentioned works of Homer, Virgil and Dante might have been considered the preserve of the intellectual elite, it was a large elite.

But translations, however brilliant, are beholden to the inspiration of another, and to say that “something was lost in the translation” is not to employ an idle cliche. Texture, context, idiom and an author’s particular style and voice are poor travelers across the gulf between languages. Although the Greek scholar and translator T.F. Higham praised translations as often attaining the level of high art, he admitted that they often “show the wrong side of the tapestry.”

However, poets and literateurs, unwilling or unable to risk all in writing a Homeric epic from scratch, soldier on with their translations of epic poetry, while the compositions of original epics have languished. Long poems have been written and collections strung together under a single title, but the great sweeping Homeric hymn has been ignored.

Only one American poet in this century has had any success with the form, and Stephen Vincent Benet succeeded beyond all expectations. His Civil War epic, “John Brown’s Body,” published in 1928, was a selection of the Book of the Month Club, won the Pulitzer Prize, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has never been out of print.

Oddly, given the copycat habits of book publishing, no one tried to emulate Benet’s great success. One argument is that epics demand great men, great times and great events, and our century, while certainly tumultuous, is arguably unheroic. Benet avoided that problem by going back, in the Homeric tradition, to an earlier time. His journey to the mid-19th century, however, was a rather brief time trip compared to “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” which were written hundreds of years, perhaps as much as a millennium, after the events occurred.

Michael Lind, a novelist and polemical author of such books as “The Next American Nation” and “Up from Conservatism,” offers more interesting and controversial reasons than timidity or lack of talent for the dearth of epic poetry in America. In a lengthy and informative appendix to his epic, “The Alamo,” Lind discusses the epic tradition and not so incidentally attempts, rather successfully, to disarm his critics. He chastises what he calls the American academic liberal establishment (read: the intelligentsia) for consistently deriding the epic tradition. Benet was certainly not taken seriously by most of his colleagues.

Lind argues that neither of the two great American literary intelligentsia--19th century New Englanders and 20th century Southerners--had any interest in writing American historical epics, which, he observes, had to do “less with art than with politics”--and, of course, with social class. The American intelligentsia, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, has always been rather snobbish, and an “American historical epic,” says Lind, “whether based on war, slave escapes, or frontier exploration, requires sympathetic, though not sentimental, portrayals of the very sorts of people whom the American literati have tended to despise.”

Lind might also have added a relatively new group that has weighed in with its own arguments against the old-line literary masterpieces. Feminists in the academy have no patience for what can, in truth, be read as old-fashioned tales of male derring-do and bonding. The epics are therefore anathema to the politically correct. In a recent letter to the New York Times, a California woman took a reviewer to task for praising Robert Fagles’ new translation of “The Odyssey,” which she dismissed as “a quintessential male fantasy.” She took particular exception to the reviewer’s “naive, uncritical and pre-theoretical acceptance of Homer’s text as a ‘timeless Great Book.’ ”

Another disgruntled reader, however, had already trumped her. At last year’s graduation at Columbia University, a young woman carried her copy of “The Odyssey” to the ceremony in order to throw it into the air and out of her life. She was thankful that she would never have to read it again, she crowed to a reporter.

These two women might be wrongheaded, but their views are part of an early and ongoing tradition shared by some illustrious figures. John Quincy Adams was repelled by the goings-on in “The Iliad,” as was Thomas Paine. Benjamin Rush even called for eliminating classical studies altogether, fearing that if people read “agreeable histories of ancient crimes,” they might be moved to copy them. The famous Philadelphia physician and founding father might be said to have anticipated the rants of Catharine MacKinnon.

Presumably much of the antipathy for the epic is based on the misunderstanding that the great epic poems glorify war. Lind argues persuasively and correctly that this is a misreading. “A tragic epic in the manner of the Iliad,” he says, “will commemorate a war important to the poet’s people without romanticizing combat. . . . Epics should neither idealize nor vilify war, but treat it as what it is--a perennial part of the existence of human communities, in which what is best and worst in human nature is shown in sharp relief.”

Dozens of novels, films, television films, biographies, autobiographies and histories have covered the bloody ground at the Alamo, but no one has had the inspiration, or perhaps the sheer nerve or the talent, to write an epic poem. Lind, happily, has all three. His is a splendid poetic re-creation of the 1836 siege and massacre at the ruined mission of San Antonio de Valera, better known as the Alamo.

This new poem, less than 400 pages, comprises 12 books of 858 stanzas and runs to 6,006 lines. Written in rhyme royal--the seven-line stanza rhyming ababbcc, which was perfected by Chaucer in the 14th century--”The Alamo” richly evokes the passion, the politics, the bravery, the humanity and the butchery of one of the great events in American history, the Texas Revolution.

The Revolution lasted just three months and the siege just 13 days, but Lind weaves together the complicated events from the decades before and after to underscore the importance of Texas for the United States and Mexico. While the shifts backward are illuminating and gracefully done, the one sudden excursion into the future leaves the reader disoriented and distracted. And Lind’s judgments of people and interpretations of events are certain to raise disagreements among specialists who have consulted the same sources. But a poet has license denied his more prosaic colleagues.

Lind’s objective, like the objectives of chroniclers of the past, extends beyond history and politics. He wants us to see and hear and smell and feel the heroism and cowardice and bravery, the folly and wisdom, the vanity and pride and, yes, the violent ends, which were as bloody as anything before the walls of Troy.

Lind had many characters to build his narrative around. James Bowie, Sam Houston and Davy Crockett are all important figures in the tale, but who else to command the narrative but the commanders themselves: On the Texas side was William Barrett Travis, the headstrong, proud, handsome young Southerner whose yearning for glory cost him and 184 other men their lives. The Mexicans were led by Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. That despot, who had crowned himself “Emperor for Life” and who called himself “the Napoleon of the West,” was as besotted by power as any Greek or Trojan. But Lind’s real subjects--and heroes--are the farmers, peasants and yeomen of both sides.

As with his ancient models, Lind’s tale is to be read on several levels. It is at once a tale of bravery and courage, a sad story of lives lost, an indictment of the waste and uselessness of war, a warning of the high price to be paid for zealotry and a warning to all of the dangers of pride and arrogance. “The Alamo” is also a war memorial, surely a worthy goal in itself. The poet devotes at least one line of his epic to each of the Texans who died in the battle.

For anyone who might doubt the effectiveness of an epic poem written at this century’s end about such a violent event of some 160 years ago, I commend to them Lind’s stanzas on the Ezparza brothers--one fighting with the Mexican invaders and the other fighting and dying within the walls with the Texas defenders. We sorrow with the Mexican soldier, Francisco, as he searches for his dead brother. He studies each face in the piles of rebel corpses until he finds Gregorio’s body, which he hoists over his shoulder and carries from the smoking ruins to the widow who waits outside the walls.

Even the heartless Santa Anna is moved by the grieving brother and widow whom he finds kneeling over the body. He heeds their pleas that Gregorio’s body not be burned on the common pyre but be given to them for a proper funeral and burial. In its quiet, timeless way, the scene is as moving as Priam pleading for the body of Hector in the tent of Achilles.

So wreaths of laurel all around--for the poet, his editor and his publisher.