Narrative poetry

Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often making use of the voices of a narrator and characters as well; the entire story is usually written in metred verse. Narrative poems do not have to follow rhythmic patterns. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be complex. It is usually dramatic, with objectives, diverse characters, and metre. Narrative poems include epics, ballads, idylls, and lays.

Some narrative poetry takes the form of a novel in verse. An example of this is The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning. In terms of narrative poetry, a romance is a narrative poem that tells a story of chivalry. Examples include the Romance of the Rose or Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Although these examples use medieval and Arthurian materials, romances may also tell stories from classical mythology.

Shorter narrative poems are often similar in style to the short story. Sometimes these short narratives are collected into interrelated groups, as with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Some literatures contain prose narratives that include poems and poetic interludes; much Old Irish poetry is contained within prose narratives, and the Old Norse sagas include both incidental poetry and the biographies of poets. An example is "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service.

§Oral tradition

The Oral Tradition predates essentially all other modern forms of communication. For thousands of years, people groups accurately passed on their history through the Oral Tradition from generation to generation. As a clear example and the oldest one comes from Ancient India, the Vedic Chants, which are often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence today. In addition one of the most notable was the ancient Hebrews, people of the Middle East, they were taught and passed on the stories of God. Surprisingly this tradition lives on even today through such efforts as SimplyTheStory.org, for example, that trains indigenous story tellers in over 115 countries worldwide. The Poetry in the Bible is called the Psalms that capture stories of conquest, failure, confession, and more. Some of it is Narrative in nature.

Historically, much of poetry has its source in an oral tradition: in more recent times the Scots and English ballads, the tales of Robin Hood, of Iskandar, and various Baltic and Slavic heroic poems all were originally intended for recitation, rather than reading. In many cultures, there remains a lively tradition of the recitation of traditional tales in verse formativeness. It has been suggested that some of the distinctive features that distinguish poetry from prose, such as metre, alliteration, and kennings, at one time served as memory aids that allowed the bards who recited traditional tales to reconstruct them from memory.

A Narrative Poem usually tells a story using a poetic theme. Epic poems are very vital to narrative poems, although it is thought that narrative poems were created to explain oral traditions. The focus of narrative poetry is often the pros and cons of life.

• Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
• "The Ballad Of Charlotte Dymond" by Charles Causley
• Beowulf, oldest known English poem
• The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Crank by Ellen Hopkins
• Crossing America by Leo Connellan
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Don Juan by Lord Byron
• The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats
• Cantar de Mio Cid, (anonymous) medieval Spanish epic
• The Elder Edda (anonymous)
• The Homeric Epics (Iliad, Odyssey, and The Homeric Hymns)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, (anonymous) ancient Babylonian/Sumerian epic
• The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll
• The Kalevala (the Finish national epic)
• Lamia by John Keats
• "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes
• The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Os Lusíadas (Portugal's national epic) by Luís Vaz De Camões
• The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser
• Virgil's Aeneid
• The Laidly Wyrm of Spindleston Heugh by Josie Whitehead
• Statius' Thebaid
• The Prelude by William Wordsworth
• Paul Revere's Ride (The Landlord's Tale) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz
• Piers Plowman by William Langland
• The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare
• Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Paradise Regained by John Milton
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning
• The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• The Wreck of the Hesperus by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Tam Lin (anonymous)
• Tam o' Shanter, by Robert Burns
• The Truant by E.J. Pratt
• Terje Vigen by Henrik Ibsen
• The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll
• Out, Out- by Robert Frost
• Dust by Carlo Bordini
• The Battle of Blenheim by Robert Southey
• Love,Dad by Eavin Antony Kunnamkudath
• Regulate by Warren G and Nate Dogg

§References