This is a story-book, universal in its appeal and representative of a literary tradition from Chaucer to Auden. Its tales are of various kinds - romantic, humorous, ghostly, and gory, written over the past six hundred years.Here will be found Pope's 'Rape of the Lock' and Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner'; the tale of John Gilpin and of the Idiot Boy; 'The Lady of Shalott', 'The Pied Piper', and Lewis Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark'. In the twentieth century the narrative tradition is exemplified by Chesterton andMasefield, Charles Causley and C. Day-Lewis, amongst others.Most of the fifty-nine poems in this collection are given in their entirety, but abridgements and extracts from book-length narratives such as 'The Faerie Queene' and 'Paradise Lost' add to the richness and variety.

Victorian Narrative Verse, edited by Charles Williams, is a vast collection of poetry spanning the duration of the Victorian era. Williams, a member of the literary group known as The Inklings, has meticulously curated a selection of poems that encapsulate the unique spirit and culture of the time. This anthology serves as a window into the rich tapestry of Victorian literature, drawing attention to the era's penchant for storytelling through verse.

This 1990 study examines the genre of 'complaint' in the motif of the 'fallen woman' - a common image in Elizabethan literature.

Poetry, by definition, is voice, which here includes the worlds of both sound silence in which the poem exists. Voice in poetry represents the way in which individuals articulate themselves as subjects. English Narrative Poetry: A Babel of Voices explores how poets in different periods of English literature have manipulated voice in their verse narratives. This book, devoted to voice, explores narrative poems ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary. Starting from Shakespeare, it journeys through Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti, Browning, H. D., Ted Hughes, Jackie Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo in the light of narrative theory. The multiplicity of voice attests to the fact that narrative poetry can present itself as a ‘representation’ of real life by ‘mimicking’ the voices of women and men, creating what, taken together, comprises a babel of voices.

Over the past thirty years, narrative poems have made a comeback against the lyric approach to poetry that has dominated the past century. Drawing on a decade of conferences and critical seminars on the topic, The Contemporary Narrative Poem examines this resurgence of narrative and the cultural and literary forces motivating it. Gathering ten essays from poet-critics who write from a wide range of perspectives and address a wide range of works, the collection transcends narrow conceptions of narrative, antinarrative, and metanarrative. The authors ask several questions: What formal strategies do recent narrative poems take? What social, cultural, and epistemological issues are raised in such poems? How do contemporary narrative poems differ from modernist narrative poems? In what ways has history been incorporated into the recent narrative poetry? How have poets used the lyric within narrative poems? How do experimental poets redefine narrative itself through their work? And what role does consciousness play in the contemporary narrative poem? The answers they supply will engage every poet and student of poetry.

National Book Award Finalist: The most widely read and enduring interpretation of this ancient Babylonian epic. One of the oldest and most universal stories known in literature, the epic of Gilgamesh presents the grand, timeless themes of love and death, loss and reparations, within the stirring tale of a hero-king and his doomed friend. A National Book Award finalist, Herbert Mason’s retelling is at once a triumph of scholarship, a masterpiece of style, and a labor of love that grew out of the poet’s long affinity with the original. “Mr. Mason’s version is the one I would recommend to the first-time reader.” —Victor Howes, The Christian Science Monitor “Like the Tolkien cycle, this poem will be read with profit and joy for generations to come.” —William Alfred, Harvard University

C.S. Lewis enjoyed both stories and poetry. His narrative poems combine his gift in story-telling with his skills as a poet. The four pieces in this book are the only narrative poems by Lewis known to be in existence. The poems are full of Lewis's romantic imagination; they display his love and knowlege of classic mythology and his own mastery of the English language. Dymer (1926) - Launcelot (?early 1930s) - The Nameless Isle (1930) - The Queen of Drum (1938) 'Dymer' was begun by Lewis as a story in prose and the original idea had 'come to him' at the age of 17. It tells the story of a man who begets a monster. The monster kills his father and becomes a god. 'Launcelot' is based on the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and 'The Nameless Isle' is the story of a shipwrecked mariner and his adventures on a magic island. 'The Queen of Drum' tells of an old pompous king and his young queen who eventually has to choose between heaven, hell and fairyland.