Epic Poems and Verse Narratives: Free EPUB

Twelve books on the site are long poems with a story: two Homeric epics, Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron, Whitman, Browning, Blake and Ovid. The Iliad is the oldest at roughly 2,700 years old and the Metamorphoses the newest, though it was written in 8 AD.

The shelf is small because a long poem is a rare object: it needs a translator, a metre and a reader willing to keep going. The English versions here are the standard public-domain ones, from Chapman’s Homer to Longfellow’s Dante, and their metres differ enough that the word counts are only loosely comparable.

Every long poem on this shelf

Twelve titles, oldest first, from the Iliad to the Metamorphoses.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
c. 750 BC	The Iliad	Homer	Epic poem	155,801	9 h
8	Metamorphoses	Ovid	Epic poem	131,300	7 h
1000	Beowulf	Anonymous	Epic poem	24,921	1 h
1320	The Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	Epic poem	111,673	6 h
1387	The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	Verse	151,000	8 h
1590	The Faerie Queene	Edmund Spenser	Epic poem	280,000	16 h
1667	Paradise Lost	John Milton	Epic poem	82,000	5 h
1794	Songs of Innocence and of Experience	William Blake	Verse	5,600	1 h
1819	Don Juan	Lord Byron	Epic poem	130,000	7 h
1850	Sonnets from the Portuguese	Elizabeth Barrett Browning	Verse	5,700	1 h
1855	Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman	Verse	122,000	7 h
1871	The Odyssey	Homer	Epic poem	119,000	7 h

How this list was made

Inclusion follows the form recorded on the page: Epic poem, or Verse where the work is a narrative poem. Collections of short poems stay on the poetry shelf without appearing here.

Word counts are for the English text offered here. Blank verse runs longer than rhyming couplets for the same original, so Milton and Bryant are not measured the same way.

Questions readers ask

Which is the best one to start with?

Beowulf, at about 25,000 words, is the shortest here and the oldest long poem in English. The Odyssey is the next step and far more inviting.

Do I need to read these in translation?

Unless you read Greek, Old English or Italian, yes. The book pages name each translator, and the notes explain what that choice changes.

Why is Leaves of Grass on a narrative list?

Because the page records it as verse and it has a narrative spine, a life unfolding in sections. Purists would put it with lyric poetry; the site follows the form field.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.