The Grand Inquisitor

“The Grand Inquisitor” is not really a poem, but a piece of poetic prose. Ivan, the poem’s fictional author, presents his piece as a kind of fantasy, “the muddled poem of a muddled student who never wrote two lines of verse” (262). When Ivan recites his poem, his performance has little in common with oral poetic tradition besides the fact of being spoken aloud. Though it’s never explained why Ivan refers to “The Grand Inquisitor” as a poem, it may be an attempt to invoke the authority of poetry without its form.

Nevertheless, even without meter “The Grand Inquisitor” is evocative of epic poetry. Its grisly imagery of the burning of heretics, its epiphany of the divine Christ, and the Grand Inquisitor’s long and elaborate speech are all features of epic poetry, which chronicles the acts of divine beings and the formation of cultures. It is also significant that not only is “The Grand Inquisitor” recited, but Ivan even makes a point of insisting that he has memorized it and has never written it down—qualities that connect his work even more closely with ancient sung epics that were orally reproduced long before being written down.