David L. Harrison I’m a fan of narrative poems, poems that tell a story. As I see it, that’s how poetry started, with epic poems that had to be memorized to be passed down, as people didn’t ...

2 Written some time around 1160, König Rother is the oldest example in German of the secular epic, the first long narrative poem in the vernacular to have come down to us which seeks, not to instruct ...

He brought a colloquial and realistic style to the Persian epic and his heritage is widely appreciated ... virtually define the forms of mystical lyric and mystical narrative poetry, respectively.