The Long Narrative Poem

Abstract

There has been a sustained campaign, in recent years, against a conception of the nineteenth century as a period of short, lyric, easily digestible poetry; an unearthing of the innumerable behemoths, the retroactive excision of which from the Victorian canon has tended to skew perceptions of the poetic aspirations of the age. The layer of accumulated dust on many of these tomes is understandable. The day of Philip James Bailey’s 900-odd page Festus, Alexander Smith’s A Life-Drama and Austin’s The Human Tragedy, was short-lived, and the excavation of these more or less moribund giants serves rather as a recuperation of cultural history than an act of literary revival. This challenge to the version of literary history in which ‘Dover Beach’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ are the archetypal forms of Victorian poetry has been mounted from various angles by writers such as Dino Felluga, reconstructing a narrative of the rise and decline of the verse-novel in the middle of the century; Adam Roberts, whose guide to Romantic and Victorian Long Poems probes the rationale behind the nineteenth-century obsession with length; and a host of commentators on the fraught after-life of the epic in modern times.¹ The definitive study in this vein is Herbert Tucker’s magisterial survey Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910, which delivers the death blow to any lingering impression that the long poem was an anomalous and anachronistic creature on the post-Augustan literary scene. ‘In Robert Burns, George Crabbe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the two Rossettis’, he points out, ‘we may number on the fingers of one hand those who declined the challenge’ of the long — specifically epic — poem during this period.²

‘I have heard Hunt say and may be asked — why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer — Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose […] which may be food for a Week’s stroll in the Summer? Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs Williams comes down stairs? a Morning work at most. Besides a long Poem is a test of Invention which I take to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails, and Imagination the Rudder. Did our great Poets ever write short Pieces?’

John Keats, letter of 1817

‘I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, “a long poem,” is simply a flat contradiction in terms. […] But the day of these artistic anomalies is over. If, at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality, which I doubt, it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again.’

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850)