List of long poems in English
This is a list of English poems over 1000 lines. This list includes poems that are generally identified as part of the long poem genre, being considerable in length, and with that length enhancing the poems' meaning or thematic weight. This alphabetical list is incomplete, as the label of long poem is selectively and inconsistently applied in literary academia.
Poet |
Poem |
Year published |
Length |
Anonymous |
Maz'zaroth[1] [2] |
2013 |
2 lines |
A. R. Ammons | Sphere: The Form of a Motion | 1973 | |
A. R. Ammons | Tape for the Turn of the Year | | |
Matthew Arnold | Sohrab and Rustum | | |
John Ashberry | Flow Chart | 1991 | |
W.H. Auden | The Sea and the Mirror | | |
W.H. Auden | The Age of Anxiety | | |
Sri Aurobindo | Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol | 1951 | ca. 24,000 lines |
| Beowulf | 8th-11th Century | 3,182 lines |
John Berryman | The Dream Songs | 1969 | ca. 2 lines |
Richard Blackmore | Eliza | 1705 | |
Richard Blackmore | Redemption | 1722 | |
Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Aurora Leigh | 1856 | |
Robert Browning | The Ring and the Book | 1868-69 | 5 lines |
Lord Byron | Don Juan | 1824 | |
Lord Byron | Childe Harold's Pilgrimage | 1812-18 | |
Geoffrey Chaucer | Troilus and Criseyde | c. 1380s | |
Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Christabel | 1797; 1800 | 6 lines |
Hart Crane | The Bridge | 1930 | |
| Cursor Mundi | ca. 1300 | ca. 7 lines |
H.D. | Helen in Egypt | | |
H.D. | Trilogy | 1944-46 | |
William Davenant | Gondibert | 1651 | |
James Dickey | The Zodiac | 1976 | |
Edward Dorn | Slinger | | |
Robert Duncan | The Structure of Rime | | |
Robert Duncan | Passages | | |
Michael Drayton | Poly-Olbion | 1612; 1622 | 15,000 lines |
T. S. Eliot | Four Quartets (including Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) | 1936–1943 | |
Claudia Emerson | Pinion | | |
John Fitchett (poet) | King Alfred | 1841 | ca. 131,000 lines |
Richard Glover (poet) | Leonidas | 1737 | |
Judy Grahn | The Chronicle of Queens | | |
Susan Howe | The Liberties | | |
Langston Hughes | Montage of a Dream Deferred | | |
David Jones | The Anathemata | | |
David Jones | In Parenthesis | 1937 | |
John Keats | Endymion (poem) | 1818 | ca. 4,000 lines |
William Langland | Piers Plowman | ca.1370-90 | ca. 7,300 lines |
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Evangeline | 1847 | |
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Song of Hiawatha | 1855 | |
Carl Melanson | Amlethus | | |
Herman Melville | Clarel | 1876 | 18,000 lines |
John Milton | Paradise Lost | 1667 | 10,565 lines |
John Milton | Paradise Regained | 1671 | 2,070 lines |
John Milton | Samson Agonistes | 1671 | 1,758 lines |
Peter Oresick | Warhol-o-rama | 2008 | |
Charles Olson | Maximus Poems | | |
Joseph G. Peterson | Inside the Whale | 2011 | |
Ezra Pound | Cantos | | |
Ntozake Shange | For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf | 1976 | |
Percy Bysshe Shelley | Queen Mab (poem) | 1813 | |
Percy Bysshe Shelley | Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude | 1815 | |
Percy Bysshe Shelley | The Revolt of Islam | 1817 | 4,818 lines |
Robert Southey | Joan of Arc | 1796 | |
Robert Southey | Thelma the Destroyer | 1801 | |
Robert Southey | Madoc (poem) | 1805 | |
Edmund Spenser | The Faerie Queene | 1590, 1596 | 36,000 lines |
Frank Stanford | The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You | 1977 | 15,283 lines |
Gertrude Stein | Stanzas in Meditation | 1956 | |
Mary Tighe | Psyche, or the Legend of Love [3] | 1805 | 3,348 lines |
Melvin B. Tolson | Harlem Gallery | 1965 | |
Derek Walcott | Omeros | 1990 | |
Walt Whitman | Song of Myself | 1881 | 1346 lines |
Saul Williams | , said the shotgun to the head | | |
William Carlos Williams | Paterson | 1946-58 | |
William Wordsworth | The Prelude | 1850 | |
Louis Zukofsky | "A" | | |
References