The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written.
87-404: The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality , better known simply as Night-Thoughts , is a long poem by Edward Young published in nine parts (or "nights") between 1742 and 1745. It was illustrated with notable engravings by William Blake . The poem is written in blank verse . It describes the poet's musings on death over a series of nine "nights" in which he ponders
174-423: A caliber or catalyze a change within the intended audience, they might consider the poem a failure as a whole. Poets attempting to write a long poem often struggle to find the right form or combination of forms to use. Since the long poem itself cannot be strictly defined by one certain form, a challenge lies in choosing the most effective form. Some critics, most emphatically Edgar Allan Poe , consider poetry as
261-518: A fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady". Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition. There was also a large body of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric . Hebrew singer-poets of the Middle Ages included Yehuda Halevi , Solomon ibn Gabirol , and Abraham ibn Ezra . In Italy, Petrarch developed
348-407: A general reworking of standards set by the literary tradition. This revision is noted especially by feminist critical work that analyzes how women are given a new voice and story through the transformation of a previously "masculine" form. Lynn Keller notes that the long poem enabled modernists to include sociological, anthropological, and historical material. Many long poems deal with history not in
435-507: A long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones.... It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal-necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prose—a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions—the whole being deprived, through
522-460: A long poem revising strict generic rules creates striking contrast with epic-genre expectations. Keller also notes that she agrees with critic Susan Friedman when Friedman expresses her concern that the long poem associated with the epic has been "the quintessential male territory whose boundaries enforce women's status as outsiders on the landscape of poetry." Considering that there are many long poem authors that are women, one cannot fully associate
609-435: A notable genre of importance in the early twentieth-century American literature . A long poem often functions to tell a "tale of the tribe," or a story that encompasses a whole culture's values and history. Ezra Pound coined the phrase, referring to his own long poem The Cantos . The long poem's length and scope can contain concerns of a magnitude that a shorter poem cannot address. The poet may see himself or herself as
696-404: A poem written so that it could be set to music—whether or not it actually was. A poem's particular structure, function, or theme might all vary. The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created by the pioneers of courtly poetry and courtly love largely without reference to the classical past. The troubadors , travelling composers and performers of songs, began to flourish towards the end of
783-587: A rise of lyric poetry during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems. Italian lyric poets of the period include Ugo Foscolo , Giacomo Leopardi , Giovanni Pascoli , and Gabriele D'Annunzio . Spanish lyric poets include Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer , Rosalía de Castro , and José de Espronceda . Japanese lyric poets include Taneda Santoka , Masaoka Shiki , and Ishikawa Takuboku . In
870-437: A series of 537 watercolour illustrations from which he planned to engrave about 200 for publication. The first volume – with forty-three engravings by Blake – was published in 1797, but it was a commercial failure and the expensive publishing venture was abandoned. Because the principal evidence of Blake's work on these illustrations was the comparatively short series of engravings, art history has been slow to recognise
957-456: A single narrative. George Oppen's Discrete Series relates its poetic seriality to the mathematic concept of a discrete series. Langston Hughes' Montage of a Dream Deferred qualifies as a serial lyric as well as a montage. The best-known and most highly regarded example of a collage long poem is T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land . Critic Philip Cohen describes Eliot's use of the collage in his article "The Waste Land, 1921: Some Developments of
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#17330938072831044-461: A somewhat cohesive whole. The best known Bengali long poem is JAKHAM (The Wound) written by Malay Roy Choudhury of India during the famous Hungryalist movement in 1960s. A montage is similar to a collage in that it consists of many voices, most famously portrayed in Langston Hughes ' Montage of a Dream Deferred . The poet provides a comprehensive portrait of 20th century Harlem through
1131-460: A standard pattern of rhythm. Although much modern lyric poetry is no longer song lyrics, the rhythmic forms have persisted without the music. The most common meters are as follows: Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain . For the ancient Greeks , lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: Verse that was accompanied by a lyre , cithara , or barbitos . Because such works were typically sung, it
1218-493: A tribe or a nation, quests, history (either recitation or re-telling in order to learn from the past), a hero figure, or prophecies. Other subgenres of the long poem include lyric sequence, series, collage, and verse-novel. What unites each of these subgenres under the heading of long poem is that their length has importance in their meaning. Each subgenre, however, is unique in its style, manner of composition, voice, narration, and proximity to outside genres. Sequence poetry uses
1305-422: A trip to the underworld, talk of a muse, etc. In interviews, Walcott has both affirmed and denied that Omeros is tied to the epic form. In one interview he stated that it was a type of epic poem, but in another interview he said the opposite, stating as part of his evidence that there are no epic-like battles in his poem. In Omeros Walcott implies that he has never read Homer, which is probably untrue based on
1392-434: A voice in the prestigious genre. Various poets have undertaken a "revisionary mythopoesis" in the long poem genre. Since the genre has roots in forms that traditionally exclude poets who have minimal cultural authority, the long poem can be a "fundamental revision," and function as a discourse for those poets (Friedman). These "re-visions" may include neglected characters, deflation of traditionally celebrated characters, and
1479-403: A way to end it or wrap it up. Fear of failure is also a common concern, that perhaps the poem will not have as great an impact as intended. Since many long poems take the author's lifetime to complete, this concern is especially troubling to anyone who attempts the long poem. Ezra Pound is an example of this dilemma, with his poem The Cantos . As the long poem's roots lie in the epic, authors of
1566-437: A whole to be more closely tied to the lyric. They complain that the emotional intensity involved within a lyric is impossible to maintain in the length of the long poem, thus rendering the long poem impossible or inherently a failure. In his article "The long poem: sequence or consequence?" Ted Weiss quotes a passage from M. L. Rozenthal and Sally M. Gall's "The Modern Poetic Sequence" inspired by Poe's sentiments, "What we term
1653-458: Is a "long poem" when its length enhances and expands upon the thematic, creative, and formal weight of the poem. Though the term "long poem" may be elusive to define, the genre has gained importance both as a literary form and as a means of collective expression. Lynn Keller solidifies the genre's importance in her essay, "Pushing the Limits," by stating that the long poem will always be recognized as
1740-402: Is about the psychological journey of Helen. Other characteristics of the epic include a hero figure, myths, and quests for the characters. Many such characteristics are seen in various long poems, but with some changes. For example, Helen In Egypt brings mythic revision, or revisionary mythopoesis, into play. Even though it includes the myth from the epic, the revised telling of the myth makes
1827-470: Is added by having Harlem shown through multiple people, as opposed to Hughes simply speaking from his own understanding of what makes Harlem. A verse narrative, as one might expect, is simply a narrative poem, a poem that tells a story. What is interesting about this subgenre is that owing to its place in the flexible category of long poem, the verse-narrative may have disrupted convention by telling its story in both poem and narrative. This combination broadens
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#17330938072831914-441: Is distinct and has meaning in itself, yet it functions as an integral part of the series, giving it a greater meaning as within the long poem as well. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi and Ian Laurie examine the work of Oton de Grandson in the lyric series, or "ballad series" form. Grandson wrote several sets of short love lyrics, using the series form for narrative coherence and thematic construction, as well as to examine different aspects of
2001-447: Is in many ways both the culmination of medieval courtly love poetry and the beginning of Renaissance love lyric. A bhajan or kirtan is a Hindu devotional song . Bhajans are often simple songs in lyrical language expressing emotions of love for the Divine . Notable authors include Kabir , Surdas , and Tulsidas . Chinese Sanqu poetry was a Chinese poetic genre popular from
2088-596: Is love. Notable authors include Hafiz , Amir Khusro , Auhadi of Maragheh , Alisher Navoi , Obeid e zakani , Khaqani Shirvani , Anvari , Farid al-Din Attar , Omar Khayyam , and Rudaki . The ghazal was introduced to European poetry in the early 19th century by the Germans Schlegel , Von Hammer-Purgstall , and Goethe , who called Hafiz his "twin". Lyric in European literature of the medieval or Renaissance period means
2175-512: Is no "middle ground." They view long poems as ultimately being either epics or lyrics. Many critics refer to the long poem by various adjective-filled subgenre names that often are made of various components found within the poem. These can lead to confusion about what a long poem is exactly. Below you will find a list describing the most common (and agreed upon) subgenre categories. The long poem genre has several advantages over prose and strictly lyric poetry. The most obvious difference between
2262-452: Is no such thing as true long poem, only long strings of short poetic devices and experiences. These overly inclusive definitions, though problematic, serve the breadth of the long poem, and have fueled its adaptation as a voice for cultural identity among marginalized persons in Modern and Contemporary poetry . Only a broad definition can apply to the genre as a whole. In general, a poem
2349-461: The Aeneid and Paradise Lost have twelve books, Aurora Leigh was conceived as a nine-book epic; thus, the very structure of the work reveals its gestational nature. According to Sandra Donaldson, Barrett Browning's own experience at age forty-three of "giving birth and nurturing a child" greatly influenced her poetry "for the better", deepening her "sensitivity". The most important "parent genre" to
2436-524: The Black Mountain movement with Robert Creeley , Organic Verse represented by Denise Levertov , Projective verse or "open field" composition as represented by Charles Olson , and also Language Poetry which aimed for extreme minimalism along with numerous other experimental verse movements throughout the remainder of the 20th century, up into today where these questions of what constitutes poetry, lyrical or otherwise, are still being discussed but now in
2523-456: The sonnet form pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini and Dante 's Vita Nuova . In 1327, according to the poet, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse ("Scattered rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poems Il Canzoniere ("The Song Book"). Laura
2610-489: The sonnet . In France, La Pléiade , a group including Pierre de Ronsard , Joachim du Bellay , and Jean-Antoine de Baïf , aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry, particularly Marot and the grands rhétoriqueurs , and began imitating classical Greek and Roman forms such as the ode . Favorite poets of the school were Pindar , Anacreon , Alcaeus , Horace , and Ovid . They also produced Petrarchan sonnet cycles . Spanish devotional poetry adapted
2697-636: The "bearer of the light," to use Langston Hughes' term, who leads the journey through a culture's story, or as the one who makes known the light already within the tribe. The poet may also serve as a poet-prophet with special insight for their own tribe. In Modern and Contemporary long poems the "tale of the tribe" has frequently been retold by culturally, economically, and socially marginalized persons. Thus, pseudo-epic narratives, such as Derek Walcott's "Omeros," have emerged to occupy voids where post-colonial persons, racially oppressed persons, women, and other people who have been ignored by classic epics, and denied
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2784-427: The 11th century and were often imitated in successive centuries. Trouvères were poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France . The first known trouvère was Chrétien de Troyes ( fl. 1160s–80s). The dominant form of German lyric poetry in the period was the minnesang , "a love lyric based essentially on
2871-471: The 12th-century Jin Dynasty through to the early Ming . Early 14th century playwrights like Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing were well-established writers of Sanqu. Against the usual tradition of using Classical Chinese , this poetry was composed in the vernacular. In 16th-century Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs and Sir Philip Sidney , Edmund Spenser , and William Shakespeare popularized
2958-551: The 19th century and came to be seen as synonymous with poetry. Romantic lyric poetry consisted of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; the feelings were extreme but personal. The traditional sonnet was revived in Britain, with William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet. Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge , John Keats , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and Lord Byron . Later in
3045-519: The American New Criticism returned to the lyric, advocating a poetry that made conventional use of rhyme, meter, and stanzas, and was modestly personal in the lyric tradition. Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex, and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the middle of the 20th century, following such movements as the confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, who included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton .
3132-569: The German Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition initiated by Goethe , Herder , and Arnim and Brentano 's Des Knaben Wunderhorn . France also saw a revival of the lyric voice during the 19th century. The lyric became the dominant mode of French poetry during this period. For Walter Benjamin , Charles Baudelaire was the last example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale" in Europe. In Russia , Aleksandr Pushkin exemplified
3219-601: The Manuscript's Verse": "Eliot gradually created a more modernist poem, one which resembles a cubist collage: satiric narratives were abandoned in favor of first of dramatic poetry and then of a bold amalgamation of genres. The speakers shifted from omniscient narrators to a variety of separate-person voices and then to different voices of one shadowy character." The collage combines seemingly disparate parts or "fragments" of different voices, pieces of mythology, popular song, speeches, and other utterances in an attempt to create
3306-484: The World Answered" (with no dedication); and "The Consolation" (dedicated to Thomas Pelham-Holles ). In his 1791 book, Life of Samuel Johnson , James Boswell called Night-Thoughts "the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced". William Blake was commissioned in 1795 to illustrate Night-Thoughts for a major new edition of the poem to be published by Richard Edwards. Blake began by making
3393-537: The century, the Victorian lyric was more linguistically self-conscious and defensive than the Romantic forms had been. Such Victorian lyric poets include Alfred Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti . Lyric poetry was popular with the German reading public between 1830 and 1890, as shown in the number of poetry anthologies published in the period. According to Georg Lukács , the verse of Joseph von Eichendorff exemplified
3480-442: The character names derived from Homer. Walcott's denial of his poem being tied too heavily to the epic form may stem from his concern that people might only think of it as being an epic-influenced poem instead of transcending the epic genre. Based on this criticism of Omeros it is clear that the generic identity of a long poem greatly contributes to its meaning. Because long poems are influenced by many more strictly defined genres,
3567-517: The chronological linking of poems to construct meaning, as each lyric builds on the poems previous to it. Examples include Louise Glück 's The Wild Iris , and older sonnet cycles, such as Sir Philip Sidney 's Astrophel and Stella or Dante 's Vita Nuova . Serial lyrics similarly depend on the juxtaposition and dialogue between individual lyrics to build a greater depth of meaning. Often, these subgenres are blended, blurred or overlapped to create second-generation subgenres. The blurring between
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3654-427: The components of an Epic, nor the lyricism and shifting scope of a Lyric Sequence or a Lyric Series, nor the close relation to narrative of Verse Novel. It exists for critics generally as an accepted part of the long poem Tradition. The critic Lilach Lachman describes the Romantic long poem as one that, "questioned the coherence of the conventional epic's plot, its logic of time and space, and its laws of interconnecting
3741-445: The division developed by Aristotle among three broad categories of poetry: lyrical, dramatic , and epic . Lyric poetry is one of the earliest forms of literature. Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress – with two short syllables typically being exchangeable for one long syllable – which is required for song lyrics in order to match lyrics with interchangeable tunes that followed
3828-559: The earlier years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in the United States, Europe, and the British colonies . The English Georgian poets and their contemporaries such as A. E. Housman , Walter de la Mare , and Edmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was praised by William Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry; Yeats compared him to
3915-537: The epic to tell the story of marginalized peoples such as women rather than the victors is essentially an opportunity for the poet to rewrite history. Walcott’s Omeros is an excellent example of a long poem recording the untold history of a marginalized people. Likewise H.D.’s revision of the story of Helen of Troy in Helen is an attempt to exonerate women from the blame of the Trojan War. In this sense, form inexorably serves
4002-416: The extremities of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect. In short, a poem to be truly a poem should not exceed a half hour's reading. In any case, no unified long poem is possible." Critic Lynn Keller also expresses concerns about the genre in her essay "Pushing the Limits". Keller states that because of the debate over and prevalence of subgenres and forms within
4089-428: The forefront as opposed to warriors, Walcott revises the traditional epic form, which these critics say is something to notice as opposed to cutting off Omeros from any ties to the epic whatsoever. Furthermore, these critics say that one cannot ignore the epic influence on the poem since its characters' names are taken from Homer. In Omeros there are distinct elements obviously influenced by traditional epics, such as
4176-406: The function and meaning of the poem by indicating to the reader that the poem is, if not an epic, epic-like and therefore a history. For some female authors using the well known form of an epic is a way to legitimize their stories, but by slightly altering the epic tradition they also indicate that the traditional way is unacceptable and insufficient for their purposes. Embodying the modernist dilemma,
4263-419: The genre an implicit prestige. Long poems have been among the most influential texts in the world since Homer. By writing a long poem, a poet participates in this tradition and must prove their virtuosity by living up to the tradition. As discussed below, the traditionally difficult long poem's prestige can be revised to serve radical purposes. Additional benefits of the long poem: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
4350-478: The good and the bad of a culture, the winners and losers, and the author of that history controls the very future by manipulating the knowledge of later generations. For Friedman to deny epic associations to the long poem because they are sometimes written by women is to counter the efforts of many female long poets. If the long poem is considered an epic or invokes an epic in its length as many critics and readers aver then breaching its traditional exclusivity by using
4437-402: The like, and instead regard the form as essentially lyric. The lyric series is a genre of poetry in which the seriality of short (but connective) lyric poems enhances the long poem's meaning. Seriality may contribute narrative coherence or thematic development, and it is often read in terms of the poem's productive process, i.e. how the poem "produces its own experience"(Shoptaw). Each lyric poem
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#17330938072834524-406: The lines of the subgenres is what makes the long poem so hard to define, but it also marks the growing creativity in the use of the form. Critic Joseph Conte describes the epic as a long poem that "has to have grand voice and purpose. . . it has to say something big." Lynn Keller describes one of the epic's aspects as including a "quasi-circular quest-journey structure" that she says is present in
4611-569: The long poem Song of Myself by Whitman. Yet that long poem, Keller notes, does not have a "specified end toward which the poem or speaker is directed," unlike a more traditional long poem. Though long poems do have roots in the epic form, that does not mean long poems that are epic-like are completely epic. A second example of long poems distancing themselves from the traditional epic form is seen in Helen In Egypt by H.D. Though traditional epics feature physical quests or journeys, Helen In Egypt
4698-469: The long poem and other literary genres is the sheer difficulty of composing a long work entirely in verse. Poets who undertake the long poem face the serious problem of creating a work that is consistently poetic, sometimes taking strict forms and carrying them through the whole poem. However, the poets who do choose the long poem turn this liability into an advantage—if a poet can write a long poem, they prove themselves to be worthy. The very difficulty gives
4785-403: The long poem as being a poem that is simply "book-length," but perhaps the simplest way to define "long poem" is this: a long poem is long enough that its bulk carries meaning. Susan Stanford Friedman describes the long poem as a genre in which all poems that are not considered to be short can be considered a part. Edgar Allan Poe , in his essay The Philosophy of Composition argued that there
4872-416: The long poem as epic often contains the seeming belief in the futility of tradition and history paired with the obvious dependence on them. A lyric sequence is a collection of shorter lyric poems that interact to create a coherent, larger meaning. The lyric sequence often includes poems unified by a theme. A defining characteristic of this subgenre is that each lyric enhances the meaning of the other lyrics in
4959-405: The long poem is the epic . An epic is a lengthy, revered narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. The term "long poem" includes all the generic expectations of epic and the reactions against those expectations. Many long poem subgenres share characteristics with the epic, including: telling the tale of
5046-544: The long poem often feel an intense pressure to make their long poems the defining literature of the national identity or the shared identity of a large group of people. The American long poem is under pressure from its European predecessors, revealing a special variety of this anxiety. Walt Whitman achieved this idea of characterizing the American identity in Song of Myself . Thus, when the author feels that their work fails to reach such
5133-433: The long poem stand out as its own form. Additionally, one cannot look at the epic as a single, unified form of inspiration for long poems. As Keller points out, certain long poems can have roots in very specific epics instead of the overall epic category. The long poem Omeros by Derek Walcott has drawn mixed criticism on whether it should or should not be tied to the traditional epic form. Those against that idea say that
5220-424: The long poem with the epic genre. However, the typical exclusion of women in the epic tradition is for many female authors what makes the long poem an appealing form for laying cultural claim to the epic. Control of or at least inclusion in the creation of a cultural epic is important because the traditional epic poem like The Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid is, at its core, a written history. Written history defines
5307-484: The loss of his wife and friends, and laments human frailties. The best-known line in the poem (at the end of "Night I") is the adage "procrastination is the thief of time", which is part of a passage in which the poet discusses how quickly life and opportunities can slip away. Night-Thoughts had a very high reputation for many years after its publication, but is now best known for a major series of illustrations by William Blake in 1797. A lesser-known set of illustrations
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#17330938072835394-563: The lyric for religious purposes. Notable examples were Teresa of Ávila , John of the Cross , Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , Garcilaso de la Vega , Francisco de Medrano and Lope de Vega . Although better known for his epic Os Lusíadas , Luís de Camões is also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period. In Japan, the naga-uta ("long song") was a lyric poem popular in this era. It alternated five and seven-syllable lines and ended with an extra seven-syllable line. Lyrical poetry
5481-550: The narrative through action." Examples of the Romantic long poem is Keats' long poem Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), William Wordsworth's Recluse (Including the Prelude (1850), and The Excursion ), and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound . The Romance long poem contains many of the same components of the Romance Lyric. Michael O'Neil suggests that "much romantic poetry is torn out of its own despair" and, in fact, can exist as
5568-402: The overarching genre of long poem, critics and readers tend to choose one subgenre, typically the epic form, as being the "authentic" representative form of the genre. Therefore, this causes the other equally important subgenres to be subject to criticism for not adhering to the more "authentic" form of long poem. Other critics of the long poem sometimes hold the belief that with long poems, there
5655-425: The period include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Novalis , Friedrich Schiller , and Johann Heinrich Voß . Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese lyric poet during this period. In Diderot's Encyclopédie , Louis chevalier de Jaucourt described lyric poetry of the time as "a type of poetry totally devoted to sentiment; that's its substance, its essential object". In Europe, the lyric emerged as the principal poetic form of
5742-612: The period is Martin Opitz ; in Japan, this was the era of the noted haiku -writer Matsuo Bashō . In the 18th century, lyric poetry declined in England and France. The atmosphere of literary discussion in the English coffeehouses and French salons was not congenial to lyric poetry. Exceptions include the lyrics of Robert Burns , William Cowper , Thomas Gray , and Oliver Goldsmith . German lyric poets of
5829-471: The poem's story is not as important as those found in traditional epics. Omeros tells the tale of fishermen in the Caribbean fighting over and lusting after a waitress instead of a typically heroic tale of battles and quests. On the other side of the argument lies the point that it is important to keep in mind that Omeros has ties to the epic genre, if only as a contrast. By putting more simple characters in
5916-466: The relation of imagination to reality and the imagination's role in compensating for the loss of religious belief." Lyric poetry Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person. The term for both modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature , the Greek lyric , which
6003-435: The revisionary sense but as a simple re-telling in order to prove a point. Then there are those who go a step further and recite a place's or people's history in order to teach. Like revisionary mythopoesis, they may attempt to make a point or demonstrate a new perspective by exaggerating or editing certain parts of history. Long poem authors sometimes find great difficulty in making the entire poem coherent and/or deciding on
6090-423: The scope of both genres, lending the poem's depth that may be lacking in the other subgenres, yet also a lyrical voice that defines it as poetry. For an example of this, one might turn to Gilgamesh , which encompasses both the subgenres Epic and Verse-Narrative. As one of the main subgenres, Verse-Narrative gets the least attention because it so effortlessly overlaps the other subgenres. It does not necessarily have
6177-622: The significance of the project within Blake's œuvre. In 1980, the Oxford University Press began publication of a projected five-volume scholarly edition of Blake's version of Night-Thoughts , edited by J. E. Grant et al.; two volumes have so far appeared and the fifth has apparently been abandoned. In 2005, the Folio Society published in two volumes a fine edition facsimile accompanied by a commentary by Robyn Hamlyn. The Folio Society facsimile
6264-591: The size of the Ramayana and Ferdowsi 's Shahnameh . In English, Beowulf and Chaucer 's Troilus and Criseyde are among the first important long poems. The long poem thrived and gained new vitality in the hands of experimental Modernists in the early 1900s and has continued to evolve through the 21st century. The long poem has evolved into an umbrella term, encompassing many subgenres, including epic , verse novel , verse narrative, lyric sequence, lyric series, and collage / montage . Lynn Keller describes
6351-507: The thematic ancestor of much medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, and modern lyric poetry, but these works were composed in elegiac couplets and so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense. During China 's Warring States period , the Songs of Chu collected by Qu Yuan and Song Yu defined a new form of poetry that came from the exotic Yangtze Valley , far from the Wei and Yellow River homeland of
6438-467: The traditional four-character verses collected in the Book of Songs . The varying forms of the new Chu Ci provided more rhythm and greater latitude of expression. Originating in 10th century Persian , a ghazal is a poetic form consisting of couplets that share a rhyme and a refrain . Formally, it consists of a short lyric composed in a single meter with a single rhyme throughout. The subject
6525-509: The tremulous fusion between "self-trust and self-doubt." Meditations are reflective thought poems. Like the Montage and the Series subgenres, Meditations can be somewhat fragmented, yet their connectivity is what makes the long poem a coherent and cohesive idea. This subgenre is based on meditations (or thoughts). Wallace Stevens believes, as do other writers in this genre, that the work does not rely on
6612-422: The troubadour poets when the two met in 1912. The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound , T. S. Eliot , H.D. , and William Carlos Williams , who rejected the English lyric form of the 19th century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought. After World War II,
6699-450: The use of multiple voices. In her essay "The Twentieth Century Long Poem," Lynn Keller states that a more philosophical influence on these meditative long poems deals with relating imagination to reality, specifically in long poems by Wallace Stevens. Keller notes, "Uninterested in American landscape, American history, modern mechanical triumphs, or the urban scene, his process-oriented long poems are speculative philosophical works exploring
6786-470: The use of numerous different voices and thus creates a cohesive whole through this fragmentary lens. What is perhaps the most debatable characteristic of this collage/montage form is the question of what is added to the message or content of the poem by using a more fragmented view. This debate is clearly visible within Langston Hughes' Montage in the question of who the primary voice belongs to and what
6873-423: The work, creating an enhanced collective metaphor, that opens the lyric sequence to unique adaptations of dialogue and other narrative/theatrical characteristics. Critic Lynn Keller lends some insight to the lyric sequence by placing it in opposition to the epic: “At the opposite end of the critical spectrum are the treatments of the long poem that do not consider issues of quest, hero, community, nation, history and
6960-565: Was also known as melic poetry. The lyric or melic poet was distinguished from the writer of plays (although Athenian drama included choral odes, in lyric form), the writer of trochaic and iambic verses (which were recited), the writer of elegies (accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the writer of epic. The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria created a canon of nine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical study. These archaic and classical musician-poets included Sappho , Alcaeus , Anacreon and Pindar . Archaic lyric
7047-468: Was characterized by strophic composition and live musical performance. Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical forms in odes to a triad, including strophe , antistrophe (metrically identical to the strophe) and epode (whose form does not match that of the strophe). Among the major surviving Roman poets of the classical period, only Catullus ( Carmina 11 , 17 , 30 , 34 , 51 , 61 ) and Horace ( Odes ) wrote lyric poetry, which
7134-547: Was created by Thomas Stothard in 1799. The nine nights are each a poem of their own. They are: "Life, Death, and Immortality" (dedicated to Arthur Onslow ); "Time, Death, Friendship" (dedicated to Spencer Compton ); "Narcissa" (dedicated to Margaret Bentinck ); "The Christian Triumph" (dedicated to Philip Yorke ); "The Relapse" (dedicated to George Lee ); "The Infidel Reclaim'd" (in two parts, "Glories and Riches" and "The Nature, Proof, and Importance of Immortality"; dedicated to Henry Pelham ); "Virtue's Apology; or, The Man of
7221-413: Was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on a stringed instrument known as a kithara , a seven-stringed lyre (hence "lyric"). It is not equivalent to song lyrics, though song lyrics are often in the lyric mode, and it is also not equivalent to Ancient Greek lyric poetry, which was principally limited to song lyrics, or chanted verse. The term owes its importance in literary theory to
7308-650: Was instead read or recited. What remained were the forms, the lyric meters of the Greeks adapted to Latin. Catullus was influenced by both archaic and Hellenistic Greek verse and belonged to a group of Roman poets called the Neoteroi ("New Poets") who spurned epic poetry following the lead of Callimachus . Instead, they composed brief, highly polished poems in various thematic and metrical genres. The Roman love elegies of Tibullus , Propertius , and Ovid ( Amores , Heroides ), with their personal phrasing and feeling, may be
7395-407: Was one of the first female authors of the modern era to attempt an epic poem . In her article "Written in blood: the art of mothering epic in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning", Olivia Gatti Taylor explores Browning's attempt to write an authentically feminine epic poem titled Aurora Leigh . Taylor posits that Browning began this process with the structure of her poem, "While earlier epics like
7482-427: Was the dominant form of 17th century English poetry from John Donne to Andrew Marvell . The poems of this period were short. Rarely narrative, they tended towards intense expression. Other notable poets of the era include Ben Jonson , Robert Herrick , George Herbert , Aphra Behn , Thomas Carew , John Suckling , Richard Lovelace , John Milton , Richard Crashaw , and Henry Vaughan . A German lyric poet of
7569-565: Was the first (and thus far only) time that all 537 of Blake's illustrations have been published together in full colour. Long poem With more than 220,000 (100,000 shloka or couplets) verses and about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is one of the longest epic poems in the world. It is roughly ten times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, roughly five times longer than Dante's Divine Comedy , and about four times
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