![]() The philosophical poem, too, is easily outdone by prose. As a nonheroic narrative, the long poem is even more cumbersome: think of those shipwrecked Robinsons, Edwin Arlington and Jeffers, whom no one now thinks of rescuing. Once it did, it was goodbye, epic poetry. ![]() ![]() Others followed because it was the tradition, and because the novel in prose had not yet caught on. Homer resorted to verse as a mnemonic device in a largely preliterate age. Prose can do its job, with some minor losses, much better. Yet the plot is not a basic constituent of the poetic, except perhaps as a hurdle. What is perspicuous is how much most of these depend on plot: how many nonacademics push beyond the Inferno or plod on to Paradise Regained? ![]() When we, here and now, think “long poem,” we usually mean Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, maybe Blake, and probably Yeats and Eliot. ![]() And, of course, in any combination of the above. The long poem, if we rightly exclude the dramatic, comes in three varieties: narrative, including epic philosophical, including existential and metaphysical, including religious. ![]()
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