Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story. The poems may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be simple or complex. It is usually nondramatic, with objective verse and regular rhyme scheme and meter. Narrative poems include epics, ballads, and idylls.

The oldest narrative form

Narrative poetry is among the oldest, and perhaps the oldest, genre of poetry. Much of the earliest literary works we have from many literatures, from the epic of Gilgamesh to those of Homer, in Old English poetry and Old Norse poetry, or the Sanskrit poem the Mahabarata, consist of narrative poems. Many scholars of Homer, from Quintus Smyrnaeus forward, have concluded that his tales of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed from compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes, and which were more suitable for an evening's entertainment.

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 includes 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

Much of narrative poetry is performance poetry and has its source in an oral tradition: the Scots and English ballads, the tales of Robin Hood, of , 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 form. 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.

Narrative poems

• The Adventures & Brave Deeds Of The Ship's Cat On The Spanish Maine: Together With The Most Lamentable Losse Of The Alcestis & Triumphant Firing Of The Port Of Chagres by Richard Adams
• The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Crossing America by Leo Connellan
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• The Elder Edda (anonymous)
• The Homeric Epics (Iliad, Odyssey, and The Homeric Hymns)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Kalevala (the Finish national epic)
• Os Lusíadas (Portugal's national epic by Luís Vaz de Camões)
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• Virgil's Aeneid
• Statius' Thebaid
• Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz
• Piers Plowman by William Langland
• The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Tam Lin (anonymous)
• Tam o' Shanter, by Robert Burns
• The Truant by E.J. Pratt
• Terje Vigen by Henrik Ibsen

References