long poem

Extended narrative verse

A long poem is a poem of substantial length—typically hundreds or thousands of lines—that sustains a narrative, philosophical, or thematic arc across its span.

The category includes epics like *The Iliad*, verse novels, and modernist works like *The Waste Land*.

Long poems often blend genres and resist the compression expected of lyric poetry: She spent years writing a long poem about her immigrant family's history.

Related

ode · saga · narrative · Homer · Iliad · Odyssey · meter · rhyme · heroic · heroic couplet · Milton · Paradise · Paradise Lost · Dante · Beowulf · oral tradition · bard · recitation

Categories
Opposites
length/scale

long poemepigram

Pithy, memorable saying

couplet · haiku · quatrain · tanka · limerick

form/structure

long poemsonnet

Fourteen-line metered poem

haiku · villanelle · lyric poem · acrostic

literary mode

long poemflash fiction

Ultra-short story genre

aphorism · short story · prose poem · maxim · novel

Family

long, longer, longest, longish, longing, longingly, lengthy, lengthen, length

Familiarity
Top 500,000
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Known to kids · Used worldwide · Timeless · Everyday, not technical · Rated G