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

New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry

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“The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life”<br>Some Virtues of Narrative Poetry

Steve Knepper<br>Aug 06, 2026

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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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]<br>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?<br>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,<br>Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedJake’s family were vaqueros.<br>They worked the cattle drives<br>Down from Montana to market.<br>They did what it took to survive.

Jake’s real name was Jesus,<br>Which the Anglos found hard to take,<br>So after a couple of days,<br>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...