After a minor late-20th-century renaissance, narrative poetry is being eclipsed by lyric poetry — and Steve Knepper argues that’s a shame. Storytelling was a poetic art for most of human history: Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the bardic traditions of rhapsodes, skalds, griots, and balladeers. Today, journals cap line lengths, prizes bypass narrative verse, and MFA workshops ask why not just write a short story.
The essay’s answer — the distinctive virtues of narrative verse:
- Compression: a narrative poem tells a story in less space than prose and more immediately, giving “more the sense of living the story, than standing outside of it.”
- Elision as power: leaving questions unanswered (as Jared Carter’s farmer poem does) makes a story more archetypal and metaphorical, not merely anecdotal.
- Form carries history: Dana Gioia’s “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz” uses the cowboy ballad’s rough meter because “the ballad has traditionally been the form to document the stories of the poor.”
- The line does narrative work: in Ron Rash’s “Wolf Laurel,” the line break separating “three sons / And a father” foreshadows the father’s death on the hunt.
The lineage runs from the Victorians (Browning, Rossetti, Longfellow, Tennyson) through an American tradition of Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers to Gioia, Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson — and verse novels like Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
Knepper’s closing claim is that if a narrative poem captures enough of life without being heavy-handed, “the story as a whole becomes a metaphor” — one that repays contemplation and takes us deeper into the complexities of human existence. The purpose of poetry, per Jared Carter’s title line, is to tell us about life.