Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes But rereading lines and looking through the footnotes feels worth it as a message emerges of society dissenting into a chaos that is mirrored in Eliot’s writing style. The Modernist style makes you work hard at understanding the poem…something that can make the poem feel even longer. It begins with an allusion to another famous long poem, The Canterbury Tales, starting: “April is the cruelest month.” What follows is a mishmash of hundreds of quotations and allusions from other poems and literature, mixed in with Arthurian legends and disjointed moments of contemporary British life. It’s also been cited as an inspiration for several other long poems and many consider it to be one of the most important poems of the 20th century. I still believe it is substantial enough to belong in this group.
But it also emphasizes friendship as a relationship as important and meaningful as romantic love.Īt 434 lines, this is one of the shorter long poems on this list. The poem includes iconic lines that have become common cliches, like: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” The poem is a good example of British Victorian poetry, both in terms of meter and form. The length of the poem, 2892 lines, adds to the meaning by emphasizing the greatness of the poet’s sadness and how Tennyson continued to mourn his friend throughout his life. The poem was published almost 21 after Arthur’s death and tracks the journey of Tennyson’s grief. by Alfred, Lord TennysonĪlfred Lord Tennyson wrote this poem as a requiem for his college friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died suddenly at the age of 22. (To be clear I fully support you reading these too!) But from well known poems to hidden gems, all of the poems below are worth investing a big chunk of time in. I might be missing a few of your favorite long poems from the literary cannon, like The Iliad and Paradise Lost. The length contributes to each poem’s meaning and message. For each of them, the length is not just about the number of words, lines, or pages. The long poems listed below range from 400 lines to 10,000. However, compared to the Sanskrit epic poem the Mahābhārata which has over 200,000 verses, this would feel very short. Compared to a 14 line sonnet or a 3 line haiku, a 100 line poem feels long. Finishing a long poem feels like a major accomplishment.īecause long is a relative term, it’s hard to define exactly what a long poem is. And reading them can be challenging in a good way. They have more room to weave different elements together.
Long poems have the ability to tell complete stories, develop characters, and deeply investigate themes. While short poems are great for sneaking more poetry into your life, there is also satisfaction in becoming fully absorbed in a longer poem. For National Poetry Month, here is a round up of ten very different, but very great long poems.
0 kommentar(er)
