Cisco Writers Club

Poems the Length of a Novel?!

Poems the length of a novel have been around for centuries. Did you have to read Dante’s Inferno back in high school? I did. (It was a struggle!) Inferno is a section of a 101,065word poem written in Italian called Divine Comedy. It’s also 700 years old. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come across as very lyrical in the English translation.

Then there’s John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton wrote it in English, so it’s more easily identified as poetry by Englishspeakers like me: “Abashed the Devil stood, / And felt how awful goodness is, and saw / Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined / His loss” (Milton, 1667, Book 4, lines 846-849).