Definition
Narrative poetry, broadly interpreted, includes any poem primarily written in the narrative mode. Narrative tells a story: it relates causally connected events that unfold over time. While lyric poetry seeks timelessness, narrative poetry narrates time-bound events through characters or a storyteller. Though the lyric/narrative binary is contested, storytelling ballads, some dramatic monologues, epics, verse-dramas, and verse-novels have all been categorized as narrative poetry. Nearly every poet of the nineteenth century, regardless of gender, adopted the narrative mode in one or more poems.
The Victorian era saw a steady and diverse outpouring of women’s narrative verse. Victorian women’s narrative poetry engaged with and interrogated ideologies of gender, colonialism, sexuality, politics, history, class, and religion. In an age that exalted the lyric and consumed the novel, the generic hybridity of narrative poetry allowed women writers to speak to social problems with a...
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McCartney, A.A. (2021). Narrative Poetry. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_123-1
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