Long poem

The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written. With more than 500,000 lines, the Epic of Manas is the longest epic poem in the world. It is roughly 17 times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, roughly 35 times longer than Dante's Divine Comedy and two and a half times the size of the Mahābhārata. In English, Beowulf and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde are among the first important long poems. 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. The long poem has evolved into an umbrella term, encompassing many subgenres, including epic, verse novel, verse narrative, lyric sequence, lyric series, and collage/montage.