Reading path
The Long Poem
Three thousand years of poets trying to hold the entire world inside a single work. Every line carries the weight of civilisations, wars, gods, and the stubborn human refusal to be forgotten. The long poem is literature at its most ambitious, its most musical, and its most demanding. There is nothing else quite like the experience of surrendering to a voice that intends to carry everything.
In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.
The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.
The route
- 1. The Epic of GilgameshAnonymous, 2100 BCE
- 2. The IliadHomer, 750 BCE
- 3. The OdysseyHomer, 750 BCE
- 4. The AeneidVirgil, 19 BCE
- 5. MetamorphosesOvid, 8 CE
- 6. BeowulfAnonymous, 850 CE
- 7. The Divine ComedyDante Alighieri, 1308
- 8. The Faerie QueeneEdmund Spenser, 1590
- 9. Paradise LostJohn Milton, 1667
- 10. The Rime of the Ancient MarinerSamuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
- 11. Don JuanLord Byron, 1824
- 12. The PreludeWilliam Wordsworth, 1850
- 13. Song of MyselfWalt Whitman, 1855
- 14. The Waste LandT.S. Eliot, 1922
- 15. The CantosEzra Pound, 1962
- 16. Four QuartetsT.S. Eliot, 1943
- 17. HowlAllen Ginsberg, 1956
- 18. OmerosDerek Walcott, 1990
- 19. The LusiadLuís Vaz Camões, 1572
- 20. Leaves of GrassWalt Whitman, 1855
- 21. The Duino ElegiesRainer Maria Rilke, 1923
- 22. Notes Toward a Supreme FictionWallace Stevens, 1942
- 23. The Orlando FuriosoLodovico Ariosto, 1516
- 24. Idylls of the KingAlfred, Lord Tennyson, 1859
- 25. MaudAlfred, Lord Tennyson, 1855
- 26. EndymionJohn Keats, 1818
- 27. HyperionJohn Keats, 1820
- 28. The Revolt of IslamPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
- 29. Evangeline: A Tale of AcadieHenry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1847
- 30. The Song of HiawathaHenry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1855
- 31. KaterynaTaras Shevchenko, 1838
- 32. The KalevalaElias Lönnrot, 1835