Long Poem

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.

The long poem traces its origins to the ancient epics, such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. With more than 220000 (100000 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 the size of the Ramayana. In English, Beowulf, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 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. In contemporary poetry, the long poem has become a space for the emergent voices of underprivileged writers including women, post-colonial subjects, the gay and lesbian community, and racially/ethnically oppressed persons, who seek the definitive communal voice connoted by early long poems.