“The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life”

This essay is the first in a new NVR series on narrative poetry. It was originally presented at Ashland University’s 2026 MFA summer residency. Narrative poetry shouldn’t need justification. Its roots are as deep as literature itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem, as are the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The great works of tragic and comic drama in both antiquity and the Renaissance, as well as Japanese Noh drama, are written in verse. For much of human history, storytelling was a poetic art. Rhapsode, bard, skald, griot, and balladeer all told stories via song, chant, refrain, rhyme, and meter.A skeptic might remain unconvinced. A proud lineage does not guarantee present viability. Dead trees can have deep roots. Prose fiction, to such a skeptic, has replaced narrative verse with little remainder. Poets, even very good poets, might continue to write narrative poems, but only as an antiquarian or boutique exercise. The living sap flows through prose.This argument doesn’t hold up, though. As Sunil Iyengar points out in his introduction to the recently published Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse,[1] the short to mid-length narrative poem comes into its own after the rise of the novel. It reaches a high point in Victorian poets such as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.[2] Iyengar sees Thomas Hardy as an important figure whose poems “resolv[ing] in irresolution” clear the way for much twentieth-century narrative verse. E.A. Robinson, Robert Frost, and Robinson Jeffers establish a distinctive narrative verse tradition in early twentieth-century American poetry. This tradition sees a minor renaissance at century’s end in the poetry of Dana Gioia, Rita Dove, Jared Carter, Marilyn Nelson, Herbert Morris, and others. The late twentieth century even sees a spate of acclaimed verse novels, including Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, as well as Derek Walcott’s contemporary verse epic Omeros.[3]Nonetheless, the general, if jagged, trend has been toward the eclipse of narrative verse by lyric verse. The trend seems to be sharper in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Full-fledged narrative poems rarely appear in journals and rarely win prizes. Many journals set a maximum line length on submissions, pre-emptively excluding narrative verse that runs over a page. Courses in narrative verse do not show up in many MFA programs. Indeed, narrative is often assumed to be a prose art. Sometimes editors and workshop participants even make the questions explicit: Why not write a short story? Why not prose instead of poetry?[4]Given the widespread equation of narrative and prose, it’s worth noting some distinctive virtues of narrative verse. But first, a quick nod to a possible counterargument. In one sense, most poetry has a narrative dimension. We live in place and time, after all. Humans constantly sequence actions and trace cause and effect. Narrative is a fundamental way in which we find patterns within the flux of existence. We understand ourselves and our world in large part through stories. It is unsurprising, then, that even imagist poems as spare as Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” or H.D.’s “The Pool” have a dramatic situation. In the classroom, students often try to extrapolate stories from them. Furthermore, poems that offer a vivid scene or a brief character sketch, especially poems that convey the author’s first-person experience, are common enough. Much less common is narrative verse with sustained plot progression, with developed characterization, with fictional or historical events and characters. This is the kind of narrative poetry about which one might ask: why isn’t this a short story instead?Some poems have a ready answer. Their form has an evident, even necessary, relationship to the narrative being told. Dana Gioia’s “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz” is about the shooting of his great-grandfather, who had given up cattle drives to tend bar in Wyoming. The poem begins,Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedJake’s family were vaqueros. They worked the cattle drives Down from Montana to market. They did what it took to survive. Jake’s real name was Jesus, Which the Anglos found hard to take, So after a couple of days, The cowboys called him Jake.The throwback form befits the poem’s themes of place and ancestry. In a brief essay on the poem, Gioia notes that he struggled to write about this family tragedy until he found the right form: the roughed-up meter and strong rhymes of “the cowboy ballad.” The ballad form situates the story squarely in the Western genre, but it also fits because “the ballad has traditionally been the form to document the stories of the poor, particularly in the Old West.” Gioia adds: “The people I wanted to remember sang and recited ballads.” All of these formal associations, the history that the very form evokes, would be lost if this poem were written in a different form or if its story were told in prose.There are similar instances where a narrative poem’s form has a particularly apt relationship with its content. Amit Majmudar’s “In the House of the Frost Giant” tells the story of a young Indian college student whose girlfriend takes him to meet her disapproving father in Minnesota.[5] It becomes a mock-epic quest to defeat the “Frost Giant” in his lair, full of allusions to Norse mythology and written in an alliterative verse that evokes Norse poetry:Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedPortly, Nordic, his cinderblock boots with crystals stuck in their tire treads, shovel shouldered he eyed my Audi as I drove gingerly up his driveway. Just done salting it (for his daughter’s sake, not her brown boyfriend’s) he stomped and harrumphed harshly enough to shiver Yggdrasil.Note here how the caesura divides boyfriend and daughter, formally establishing the father’s imposed divide, an icy crevasse, that runs throughout the poem.Another example is Marly Youmans’s uncanny book-length fairytale-in-verse Seren of the Wildwood, which is written in blank verse sections that conclude, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with a rhyming bob and wheel. One section ends with this meditation on fairy tales,Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Regret And gladness blend as one At times—who can forget, When fairy tales are done, Their magic alphabet?The bob and wheel endings allow for such thematic commentary. They also bring Seren into conversation with the Gawain poem and medieval poetry in general.Form is never simply a shipping container for the story, but its exclusive fittingness is rarely as evident as in these poems by Gioia, Majmudar, and Youmans. But they, like all good narrative poems, answer the question “Why not prose?” in other ways as well. Critics and poets often point to the compression of narrative poems. Poems tend to use fewer words, often far fewer words, than short stories. When handled well, this gives narrative poems concentrated power. It puts their contents under pressure. It can also heighten these poems’ rhetorical effects. It can strengthen their emotional punch, especially when narrative poems are read in one sitting.Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell, whose journal The Reaper helped launch the narrative poetry revival of the 1980s, write in an editorial essay that “narrative poetry can tell a story in less space than prose and more immediately. It gives more the sense of living the story, than standing outside of it, but only if the story is as unpredictable as life.”[6] Jarman and McDowell claim in another essay that if a narrative poem captures enough of life and isn’t heavy-handed, “the story as a whole becomes a metaphor,” one which repays contemplation. It takes us deeper into the complexities, the mysteries, of human existence. Jared Carter, whose verse appeared several times in The Reaper, has a poem about an old Indiana farmer whose property is claimed by eminent domain and who is supposed to move to his daughter’s home in Florida. He instead kills himself and his beloved cattle dogs during his last night on the farm. Here are the closing lines:Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHe had only known dirt under his fingernails and trips to town on Saturday mornings since he was a boy. Always he had been around cattle, and trees, and land near the river. Evenings by the barn he could hear the dogs talking to each other as they brought in the herd; and the cows answering them. It was the clearest thing he knew. That night he shot both dogs and then himself.