Long poem
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.
[2] These overly inclusive definitions, though problematic, serve the breadth of the long poem, and have fueled its adaptation as a voice for cultural identity among marginalized persons in Modern and Contemporary poetry.
Though the term "long poem" may be elusive to define, the genre has gained importance both as a literary form and as a means of collective expression.
[3] A long poem often functions to tell a "tale of the tribe," or a story that encompasses a whole culture's values and history.
In Modern and Contemporary long poems the "tale of the tribe" has frequently been retold by culturally, economically, and socially marginalized persons.
This revision is noted especially by feminist critical work that analyzes how women are given a new voice and story through the transformation of a previously "masculine" form.
Lynn Keller notes that the long poem enabled modernists to include sociological, anthropological, and historical material.
Thus, when the author feels that their work fails to reach such a caliber or catalyze a change within the intended audience, they might consider the poem a failure as a whole.
Ted Weiss quotes a passage from M. L. Rozenthal and Sally M. Gall's "The Modern Poetic Sequence" inspired by Poe's sentiments, "What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones....
For this reason, at least one half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prose—a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions—the whole being deprived, through the extremities of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect.
According to Sandra Donaldson, Barrett Browning's own experience at age forty-three of "giving birth and nurturing a child" greatly influenced her poetry "for the better", deepening her "sensitivity".
An epic is a lengthy, revered narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.
Many long poem subgenres share characteristics with the epic, including: telling the tale of a tribe or a nation, quests, history (either recitation or re-telling in order to learn from the past), a hero figure, or prophecies.
Examples include Louise Glück's The Wild Iris, and older sonnet cycles, such as Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella or Dante's Vita Nuova.
The blurring between the lines of the subgenres is what makes the long poem so hard to define, but it also marks the growing creativity in the use of the form.
"[9] Lynn Keller describes one of the epic's aspects as including a "quasi-circular quest-journey structure" that she says is present in the long poem Song of Myself by Whitman.
The long poem Omeros by Derek Walcott has drawn mixed criticism on whether it should or should not be tied to the traditional epic form.
Based on this criticism of Omeros it is clear that the generic identity of a long poem greatly contributes to its meaning.
Walcott’s Omeros is an excellent example of a long poem recording the untold history of a marginalized people.
Embodying the modernist dilemma, the long poem as epic often contains the seeming belief in the futility of tradition and history paired with the obvious dependence on them.
Critic Lynn Keller lends some insight to the lyric sequence by placing it in opposition to the epic: “At the opposite end of the critical spectrum are the treatments of the long poem that do not consider issues of quest, hero, community, nation, history and the like, and instead regard the form as essentially lyric.
Critic Philip Cohen describes Eliot's use of the collage in his article "The Waste Land, 1921: Some Developments of the Manuscript's Verse": "Eliot gradually created a more modernist poem, one which resembles a cubist collage: satiric narratives were abandoned in favor of first of dramatic poetry and then of a bold amalgamation of genres.
"[citation needed] The collage combines seemingly disparate parts or "fragments" of different voices, pieces of mythology, popular song, speeches, and other utterances in an attempt to create a somewhat cohesive whole.
[citation needed] The best known Bengali long poem is JAKHAM (The Wound) written by Malay Roy Choudhury of India during the famous Hungryalist movement in 1960s.
The poet provides a comprehensive portrait of 20th century Harlem through the use of numerous different voices and thus creates a cohesive whole through this fragmentary lens.
This combination broadens the scope of both genres, lending the poem's depth that may be lacking in the other subgenres, yet also a lyrical voice that defines it as poetry.
The critic Lilach Lachman describes the Romantic long poem as one that, "questioned the coherence of the conventional epic's plot, its logic of time and space, and its laws of interconnecting the narrative through action."
Michael O'Neil suggests that "much romantic poetry is torn out of its own despair" and, in fact, can exist as the tremulous fusion between "self-trust and self-doubt."
Like the Montage and the Series subgenres, Meditations can be somewhat fragmented, yet their connectivity is what makes the long poem a coherent and cohesive idea.
Keller notes, "Uninterested in American landscape, American history, modern mechanical triumphs, or the urban scene, his process-oriented long poems are speculative philosophical works exploring the relation of imagination to reality and the imagination's role in compensating for the loss of religious belief."
