This is where I keep the small collection of epic poems that I like to inflict on other people.
Send your mind soaring to Ancient Rome with Horatius, watch the very last Crusader battle the Turks at Lepanto, or see the Assyrian hordes crumble at Sennacherib.
Remind yourself of the transitory nature of life and the sadness of limited opportunity with Grey's Elegy, and read Samuel Johnson's prologue to his revival of A Word to the Wise about the pointlessness of judging the dead.
Read Kipling's great ode to Mechanism, McAndrew's Hymn, his tale of entrepreneurship and Love and Life and the Sea Mary Gloster, and his celebrated tale of the North-West Frontier The Ballad of East and West.
People don't seem to write this sort of epic poetry any more - politics and the hardware of war have got in the way, and the horrors of industrialised war (here's Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, which everyone who enjoyed the poems collected in the first paragraph should read) make the straight-forwardness and bright assertiveness of the standard epic seem somehow childish and inadequate.
There's no space nowadays for the hero in Kipling's East and West; the wrath of mighty nations tends to be expressed in impersonal cruise missiles, and ever since World War Two nationalism has been desperately suspect. In the realm Kipling made his own, microchips are too small and too devoid of working parts to be the subject of great hymns of praise, and, whilst Bill Gates made his fortune by careful management of thousands of employees, there's not so much opportunity for elegizing heroism in the battle for market share as there is in the battle for the Heights of Quebec.