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For rounding out the field with a very old classic, I nominate "Beowulf" - preferably in the Seamus Heaney translation.
When the fearful monster Grendel comes to Hrothgar's Hall and dashes his warriors' hopes, installing himself in the great hall and eating people alive, the hero Beowulf arrives from over the sea to wrestle the beast. He saves the Danes, who sing of his triumphs, but soon the monster's mother turns up to take him hostage...
Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.
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