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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.
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.[1] 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 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.
- ^ Spodek, Howard; Richard Mason (2006). The World's History (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education. p. 224. ISBN 0-13-177318-6. OCLC 60745253. (Two volumes—volume 1: Prehistory to 1500?)