Narrative Poetry

[Anonymous No.22550273]

What are your thoughts on this sort of thing, /lit/? It was the dominant mode of poetry before Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the rest of the English Romantics came along. Poetry that tells a story or conveys a complex idea in verse. Obviously all the epics would fall under this label, but also something like Pope's Dunciad or his Essay On Criticism.

Do you like this sort of thing? What are your favorite examples of it? Do you think it could potentially make a comeback?

[Anonymousn No.22550360]

>>22550273
The two most engaging things I've read recently were both pre-Romantic narrative poems: Dryden's translation of Virgil's Eclogue's, and Pope's Rape of the Lock. Very entertaining.

However, there's no way this style is coming back. It would feel comedically artificial to try and fit any kind of contemporary experience into refined, elaborate, structured verse.

I realise it's also extremely artificial to write about loverlorn swains singing their Arcadian songs, or nymphs and gnomes flitting across the Thames, but somehow it works... I leave it to someone else to theorise why.

[Anonymous No.22550362]

>>22550273
I'm with Poe on that, longform poetry is fucking insufferable