ABSTRACT
The ‘long poem’ is a vague and elusive term, and throughout literary history, different types of poetry such as epic, prospect poem, dramatic monologue could easily be identified as longer than others. That said, this chapter equates the long poem as a genre with the collage-like free-verse poems produced as major works particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. After a discussion of Wordsworth’s Prelude and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as antecedents of the modern long poem, the chapter discusses Eliot’s Waste Land and Reading’s Perduta Gente .
