Long poem

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The long poem is a form of lyric poetry and describes a - contrary to the genre tradition, which always emphasized the brevity and conciseness of the poem - extensive poem, which is often in several parts or laid out as a cycle . It mixes lyrical and epic elements, often without a mandatory metric form . The long poem as a phenomenon of literary modernism should be distinguished from older lyrical forms such as the epic or the ballad .

Long poem after Höllerer

Title page of Walter Höllerer's theory of modern poetry

The term long poem is particularly linked to the literary scholar and lyric poet Walter Höllerer , who in his theory of modern poetry put the long poem as an answer to the “enforced preciousness and chinoiserie ” of German verse forms : “The long poem is, in the present moment, already in its form after political; because it shows a counter-movement against narrowing into delimited areas and boxes. "

"Do not invoke 'silence' and 'falling silent'", says Höllerer. “Silence as a theory of an art form whose medium is language ultimately leads to ever shorter, more encrypted poems; The decision for whole sentences and longer lines means driving force for something flexible. ”The term“ long poem ”or“ long poem ”does not primarily refer to the number of lines. It is crucial that long poems do not appear as compressed as shorter poems and thus avoid any "festive". “In the long poem, not every word is particularly laden. Flat passages are not bad passages, but carved passages that have now more and more made their way into the short poem are poor passages. [...] Subtle and trivial, literary and everyday expressions come together in the long poem. "

Examples

In contemporary German literature , for example, Günter Herburger or Ulf Stolterfoht ( Holzrauch über Heslach ) have emerged with long poems, previously for example Bertolt Brecht ( The Education of Millet ), Rolf Dieter Brinkmann ( Westwärts 1 & 2 ) and Heiner Müller ( Mommsen's block ). According to his own statements, Uwe Tellkamp is working on a long poem called Nautilus . Important long poems of English-speaking modernism are TS Eliot's The Waste Land , Allen Ginsberg's Fall of America , Ezra Pounds Cantos and Whitman's Leaves of Grass . Bob Dylan wrote the long poem Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie in 1963 . The cyclical long poems by the Danish poet Inger Christensen det and alfabet are of great importance for contemporary poetry .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Höllerer: Theses on the long poem. In: Accents . Vol. 2 (1965), pp. 128-130.
  2. ↑ Ibid.
  3. ↑ http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendung/buechermarkt/849296/