Narrative poetry
Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often making the voices of a narrator and characters as well; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be complex. It is normally dramatic, with objectives, diverse and meter.[1] 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 the 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 those examples use medieval and Arthurian materials, romances may also tell stories from classical mythology.
Shorter narrative poems often similar in style to the short story. Sometimes, these short narratives are collected into interrelated groups, as with Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. So sagas include both incidental poetry and the biographies of poets. An example is "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service.
Oral tradition
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The oral tradition is the predecessor of essentially all other modern forms of communication. For thousands of years, cultures passed on their history through the oral tradition from generation to generation. A clear example of this – and the oldest one – comes from Ancient India, the Vedic Chant, which is 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 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 format. 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.[2]
A narrative poem usually tells a story using a poetic theme. Epics are very vital to narrative poems, although it is thought those narrative poems were created to explain oral traditions. The focus of narrative poetry is often the pros and cons of life.
List of Narrative Poems
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
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
The Divine Comedy by Dante, Italian epic
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 Iliad and the Odyssey attributed to Homer
The Epic of Gilgamesh, (anonymous) ancient Babylonian/Sumerian epic
The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll
- The Kalevala, Finnish 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 de Camões
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Virgil's Aeneid, the Roman national epic
Metamorphoses by Ovid
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
A Mile in His Shoes by Eavin Antony Kunnamkudath
Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz
Piers Plowman by William Langland
The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Paradise Lost and 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 Song of Roland (anonymous), French chanson de geste
The Wreck of the Hesperus by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tam Lin (anonymous)
Tam o' Shanter, by Robert Burns
Terje Vigen by Henrik Ibsen
Regulate (song) by Warren G and Nate Dogg
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- "Lục Vân Tiên" by Nguyễn Đình Chiểu
- "Lays of Ancient Rome" by Thomas Babington Macaulay
References
^ Michael Meyer, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005, p2134.
^ David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions. The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Taco University Press, 1991)