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.
- epicImpressively grand in scope
- verse formPoetry's structural template
- cantoDivision of long verse
- stanzaPoem's line grouping
- balladNarrative poem or song
ode · saga · narrative · Homer · Iliad · Odyssey · meter · rhyme · heroic · heroic couplet · Milton · Paradise · Paradise Lost · Dante · Beowulf · oral tradition · bard · recitation
- poetry collectionsanthology, chapbook, collected works, complete works, omnibus edition
long poemflash fiction
Ultra-short story genre
aphorism · short story · prose poem · maxim · novel
long, longer, longest, longish, longing, longingly, lengthy, lengthen, length