Talk:List of long poems in English

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Criteria?[edit]

What do we use to judge how long a poem is: number of words, or number of lines? I need to ask before taking action. -Baconfry (talk) 19:33, 16 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

terrible article[edit]

This is probably the worst article I ever seen, as if some teenager wrote down all the poetry he knew (hence a lot of short poems of Elliot) and called it 'list of long poems in English'. It includes stuff of 140 lines only, chosen very arbitrary, completely misses even such well known stuff as, well I can forgive him for not knowing 'Faerie queene', but 'The Canterbury tales'? 'Paradise Lost'?

Oh, and if we speak of translations to English, there is 'Orlando Furioso' which is both translated in rhymed verse and is like ~43k lines long in translation and therefore is longer than 'Maz'zaroth'. Also this "Maz'zaroth' is a rather strange thing, it's available on Amazon but nothing is known of the author and the poem is almost never discussed either... it's definitely a poem, not free verse, and it's long.

well[edit]

It may be worth adding the more obvious omissions. The page is really an index to (mostly) existing pages on Wiki, which provide the references. Agingjb (talk) 18:26, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I see that the number of lines has been changed to absurd numbers for several poems. Perhaps I'll try to fix when we know why.Agingjb (talk) 08:20, 23 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's time to extend this article. People from all the world seek information here. (Anagram16 (talk) 16:06, 17 February 2017 (UTC))[reply]

A topic for discussion: Should be information about verse form put into the chart? For example blank verse of rhyme royal? (Anagram16 (talk) 16:15, 17 February 2017 (UTC))[reply]

An article about Middle-English The Fall of Princes is needed. (Anagram16 (talk) 20:12, 17 February 2017 (UTC))[reply]

Can this list be salvaged?[edit]

Anagram16 and I recently began a chat about this list, which I'm bringing here to the talk page. Anagram essentially argues that this list can be useful, and has indeed improved it. But I see a list still flawed enough that it may be doing more harm than good. My main gripes are that (currently at least) this list constitutes a very small and very strange sample of a massive yet somewhat ill-defined group. If I were a deletionist, I'd delete it. But I'm not, and maybe it can be improved. Allow me to make a few notes and suggestions:

The brief lead actually stipulates 2 criteria for inclusion: (a) the poem is over 1000 lines long, and (b) the poem is of the genre "long poem". This second criterion invites controversy without illumination. Is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (which, at 131 lines, used to be in this list!) a generically "long poem" and only excluded because of the arbitrary limit of 1000 lines? Should Aurora Leigh be excluded because, even at 10,938, it is not really a "long poem", but rather a "novel in verse"? Let's ditch this impossible criterion and just go with length.
However, narrowing the scope would both give the list a fighting chance of being more representative, and more meaningful. Increasing the line limit to (a still modest) 2,000 or 3,000 would focus on more genuinely long poems, and still retain much of the current list. Furthermore, I'd suggest that we stipulate that the poems are non-dramatic and not translations. I believe these criteria, too, retain most of the list, but begin to suggest that this grab-bag actually has some sense of identity, beyond the brute force of numbers. If I were king, I'd stipulate not just that the poems are not dramatic but also that they are narrative... but I doubt that would fly around here.
The list must try to make a distinction between a long poem and a long series of poems. This is an exercise possibly doomed to failure, but one that must be attempted anyway. If The Dream Songs is a long poem, then surely so is every sonnet sequence every written (well, by our current standard, every sequence with at least 72 sonnets!). Thematic unity in a bunch of poems is not sufficient.
The fact that this list contains a strange hodge-podge of poems is really (I think) a severe criticism. Sure, the list may never be complete, but a list containing so many really obscure poems, and missing so many really famous ones, is so skewed as to be virtually disinformation.

I'll probably make a few more edits on this list, but it has a long way to go and this isn't really my fight, so I hope that someone who cares will take the list in hand and really make something encyclopedic out of it. Cheers. Phil wink (talk) 19:44, 19 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sonnet is a typically lyrical poem. So is a sequence of sonnets. I think a sequence of sonnets could be put on a such a list on only one condition - if it told a story. The only example of an epic poem written in sonnet-like stanzas is Russian Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. I do not know an English paralell poem. (Anagram16 (talk) 21:22, 19 March 2017 (UTC))[reply]