I war dead, ever since Adam died
I remained dead until Christ came
Until He arose from the grave
I remained dead yet alive, for
for the thirty-three years of
His earthly ministry
Then Christ willingly died for me
After three days of being dead
He arose, I also rising with Him
Rising in triumph and glory
Triumphing over treason and death
(Written on the 6th December, 2015)
Whispers in tears of velvet squares apposed to yellow sunshine.
I can only sense in shades of the most prominent colours of the rainbows
I sit watching the crowds of people walking faster than he knows
You are untracable in waterfalls cascading trumpets playing all goes
We walk hand in hand to keep the demons aways from the scarecrows
Look at the diamond how prescoius it looks with all the colours of universe in rose
Sorry if this doesn,t catch your imagination but my time flies faster as time flows
Persist my friend because one day the arch of your back will bend and tomorrow you will be smaller and you will dose
Relinquish your arms and follow the sound of the tambourine bouncing in your head once it will say how it bows
Polite people follow me because I have dared to dream about the way that sorrow shows
Into your anguish tainted by members of the elite to watch you try once again in tatters as she grows
I feel complete in actions and intent while my dog snoozes for teztimecwill pose
Yes the whispering tears of velvet squares apose to yellow sunshine butvreme ber the white light alwaysxand forever glows.
This is the greatest poem ever written
I am
You are
I am you
You are me
I want you
You want me
I am you
You are me
I am you
You aren,t me
I am not you
We are one
We are human
You are human
I am human
I am
You are
I
You
We are one
Money
I am not made of money but my clothes say I am
I am not made of money but my voice tells me I am
I am not made of money but society says I am
I am not made of money but my wife thinks I am
I am not made of money but my life says I am
I am not made of money but my history tells me I am
I am not made of money but the roman history tells me I am
I am not made of money but judas from the bible tells me I am
I am not made of money but God tells me I am not so I can be who I am
My sea aqua eyes, Your ataraxes,
tides that take You cool deep,
to where love be balm
upon heavy heaving breast...
I hold You when Night sparkles silent,
rose comb braiding Your hair,
You smile with satisfaction, calm sweet,
Unviolated by nightmares dark rude,
Your eyelashes ease soft,
My fingertips follow smooth beauty hue...
J.A.B.
When Your eyes become moonstones
on the shore of death,
I will kiss You with bloodtone breath...
As chaos becomes a catalyst
to mood electric blue,
embrace the voltage vibing true...
Tremble, O heart humble red,
a tremor arrives to blush,
skin warm from love's rush...
I AM Yours...every pulse a spiking of You...
J.A.B.
Epic
I feel good in versache
I feel good in top man jeans
I feel good in pajamas
I feel good in all of my means
I feel good in a meteor storm
I feel good eating heinz baked beans
I feel good in the bahamas
I feel good oh god I,m in love with beatrice
I feel good just looking at you what are human beings
Lola
Lola is the name of a woman I have just met
She is very familiar of my work as I always bet
I know she likes gospel music as she sings to set
Lola transcends my mind because I often let
She is very intelligent and gives advice to vet
I know I like her very much but she doesn,t want a pet
Lola is her name and her children offer her my debt
She is wonderful like a cherished person should always get
I know she has the brownest eyes of which I often look at and yet
Lola is her name and I feel wonderment in her company but we never ever really met.
Your love is my drug
You're the pills
That gives me peace
When my heart is in pieces
You're the fantasy
That gives me ecstasy
You're my anchor
When I'm down
You pick me up
When everyone neglects.
Your love is my drug
You're my map to the top
You always correct
My wrongs
Putting me in awe
You're my ally
You stimulate my nerves
Whenever I'm down cast.
Your love is my drug
I'm intoxicated by your love
I can't live a moment without you
When you're not here
I'm always inactive
You're my muse
You connect my fuse to positivity
You give me the ability to be productive.
I believe
I believe in you
Do you believe in me
I believe in two
Do you believe in free
I believe in true
Do you believe in Be
I believe in do
Do you believe in a tree
I believe in you
Do you believe we
I believe in you and free and be and two and see the world as it really is in total glee.
Michael
He,s not pepsi he,s not cola he,s Michael
He,s not a man he,s not a woman he,s Michael
He,s not a music writer he,s not a genius he,s Michael
He,s not a performer he,s not an artist he,s Michael
He,s not a son he,s not a father he,s Michael
He,s not a symphony of ochestra,s he,s not a word he,s Michael
He,s not a world he,s not a universe he,s Michael
He s not a billionaire he,s not a producer he,s Michael
He,s not a lonely heart he,s not a taker he,s Michael
He,s not a pebble on the ocean bed he,s not niagra falls he,s Michael
He,s not anyone you could ever meet he,s not a chance he,s Michael
He is however the most talented human being that has ever lived and guess what his name is it,s not Michael.
Audrey
I love my Audrey very much
She turns my world upside down
She spins a word like a magician
She counts the seconds until we meet
She knows what love is and what its for
She transcends the moon and stars until they unite all for the grace of God
She is my ying to my yang
She is a house full of jokers when all you need is aces
She is poetry complete wuth degrees in being cool with it
She wants what I want and that is world peace
She knows how to get it too and loves devided are not on the scale of her being
She was my heart break but now she is my heart take
She is wonderfull and I am merely a man
She is the guru while I am merely gurus child
She would win any competition of beauty but ghen sh,d hide and say its not fair
She will be my guiding light when darkness peers through my window
She is a norrowing of a door when I am merely the gap between darkness and light.
She is Audrey My one true love eternally forever until I die.
Audrey.
Audrey
I love my Audrey very much
She turns my world upside down
She spins a word like a magician
She counts the seconds until we meet
She knows what love is and what its for
She transcends the moon and stars until they unite all for the grace of God
She is my ying to my yang
She is a house full of jokers when all you need is aces
She is poetry complete wuth degrees in being cool with it
She wants what I want and that is world peace
She knows how to get it too and loves devided are not on the scale of her being
She was my heart break but now she is my heart take
She is wonderfull and I am merely a man
She is the guru while I am merely gurus child
She would win any competition of beauty but ghen sh,d hide and say its not fair
She will be my guiding light when darkness peers through my window
She is a norrowing of a door when I am merely the gap between darkness and light.
She is Audrey My one true love eternally forever until I die.
Audrey.
Audrey
I love my Audrey very much
She turns my world upside down
She spins a word like a magician
She counts the seconds until we meet
She knows what love is and what its for
She transcends the moon and stars until they unite all for the grace of God
She is my ying to my yang
She is a house full of jokers when all you need is aces
She is poetry complete wuth degrees in being cool with it
She wants what I want and that is world peace
She knows how to get it too and loves devided are not on the scale of her being
She was my heart break but now she is my heart take
She is wonderfull and I am merely a man
She is the guru while I am merely gurus child
She would win any competition of beauty but ghen sh,d hide and say its not fair
She will be my guiding light when darkness peers through my window
She is a norrowing of a door when I am merely the gap between darkness and light.
She is Audrey My one true love eternally forever until I die.
Audrey.
Words
Words
Words are simply a gesture of emtions
Words are simply thought processes elaborated
Words are simply content enriched by human responses
Words are simply an sad fault exposed response eloborated frivilous conjecture of tides of waves collected in text books
Words change only when used by judges judging lest we be judged ourseleves.
Introduction
The pleasure of reading epics side by side lies in watching each poet decide what deserves magnitude. One writer may enlarge a public struggle until it seems to involve an entire world; another may reveal the heroic pressures hidden inside family loyalty, grief, sport, school, or an ordinary journey. The form invites breadth, but breadth can come through geography, time, consequence, emotional range, or the number of lives touched by one choice.
As you browse the community poems, notice the variety of narrative distances and voices. Some poets may speak with ceremonial gravity, while others use humor, contemporary speech, or an intimate witness. Some may develop action through successive scenes; others may condense a much larger imagined story into selected episodes. These differences matter because an epic must continually negotiate between movement and reflection. Too much event can leave little emotional depth, while too much explanation can weaken momentum.
Reading beyond the first example reveals how differently poets establish scale, shape a central figure, and connect personal decisions with communal consequences. Compare where each poem slows down, what it repeats, which images carry symbolic weight, and how the ending changes the meaning of the journey. Not every poem will approach convention in the same way, and that is part of the collection's value. Together, the poems offer a workshop in interpretation: they show how a shared form can support solemnity, adventure, satire, lament, wonder, and moral uncertainty without requiring every poet to sound alike.
Reading Guide
An epic asks readers to hold several kinds of attention at once: the immediate scene, the larger course of events, the central figure's changing purpose, and the values placed under pressure. As you read the community poems, resist judging only by length or dramatic subject matter. Look instead at how each poet earns a sense of consequence. A small object, repeated phrase, private hesitation, or shift in narrative distance may do more to establish magnitude than a long account of action. Comparing several poems will show whether expansion deepens the experience or merely extends it.
- Follow the narrative spine. Identify the desire, duty, danger, or question that carries the poem forward. Episodes feel purposeful when they alter that central movement. While comparing poems, ask: what keeps this journey from becoming a sequence of unrelated events?
- Notice how scale is created. A poet may widen the setting, stretch the time frame, invoke collective memory, or show consequences spreading beyond one person. Ask: does the poem make its world feel large through accumulation, implication, contrast, or all three?
- Listen to the governing voice. Consider whether the speaker sounds ceremonial, intimate, skeptical, admiring, comic, or unstable. Voice determines how much authority readers grant the telling. Ask: how would the poem's moral atmosphere change if the same events were narrated by another witness?
- Mark changes in pace. Summaries can cross years quickly, while scenes, dialogue, and sensory detail can make one moment expansive. This variation prevents sustained narrative from becoming monotonous. Ask: where does each poet slow time, and has that moment earned special emphasis?
- Track recurring images and phrases. Repetition can bind distant episodes together and turn an object, place, or action into a measure of change. Ask: when an image returns, has its emotional or symbolic meaning altered?
- Examine the central figure's complexity. Magnitude becomes more compelling when strength coexists with blindness, doubt, cost, or divided loyalty. Ask: does the poem merely praise its central figure, or does it reveal what that figure cannot control or understand?
- Test the ending against the beginning. Epic closure may offer victory, loss, return, transformation, or unresolved consequence. Ask: does the final movement simply stop the action, or does it revise the significance of everything that preceded it?
After reading, compare the poems by tracing one element across several examples-voice, pacing, recurring imagery, or closure. That focused comparison makes differences in craft easier to see than a general judgment of which story seems grandest.
Writing Tips
Begin an epic draft by locating a story whose consequences can keep unfolding. The material need not involve spectacle, but it should support sustained pressure: a difficult undertaking, a conflict of loyalties, a passage through danger, or a choice that affects more than the chooser. In workshop, ask not only what happens, but why the telling requires breadth. The strongest drafts create the feeling that every major episode enlarges, complicates, or tests the poem's central concern.
- Choose a durable source of movement. A single striking incident may suit a shorter narrative better. For an epic treatment, look for material containing stages, reversals, encounters, sacrifices, and consequences. Before drafting, write one sentence naming the force that keeps the central figure moving when retreat would be easier.
- Build around a narrative spine, not a checklist. Do not insert elevated speeches, supernatural elements, battles, journeys, or catalogues merely because they seem conventionally grand. Use any such device only when it intensifies character, conflict, or theme. Formal recognition should arise from the poem's imaginative scale and sustained movement, not from borrowed decorations.
- Distinguish magnitude from bulk. A beginner may mistake length for importance and recount every transition. Select episodes that change the stakes. Compress routine travel or repeated labor, then expand the moment of discovery, refusal, betrayal, endurance, or recognition that redirects the whole course.
- Give the central figure resistance from within. External obstacles produce action, but inner contradiction produces depth. Let courage coexist with pride, loyalty with resentment, or conviction with incomplete knowledge. Such tensions prevent the protagonist from becoming a fixed emblem rather than a living presence.
- Control narrative distance. Move deliberately between broad overview and embodied scene. A distant view can reveal armies, generations, landscapes, or social consequences; a close view can register breath, touch, fear, fatigue, and hesitation. Too much overview becomes summary, while nonstop close-up can obscure the larger design.
- Create a sound world that can endure. Elevated language is not the same as inflated language. Favor precise verbs, purposeful rhythms, and recurring sounds over ornamental phrasing. Read several pages aloud at a time. Listen for mechanical cadence, repeated sentence shapes, accidental sing-song effects, and passages where the voice loses authority.
- Use recurring images as structural memory. Select a few objects, weather patterns, colors, gestures, or places that can return in altered circumstances. A weapon may become a burden; a road may shift from promise to exile. Transformation gives repetition meaning and helps readers connect widely separated episodes.
- Design supporting figures as pressures, not furniture. Allies, rivals, witnesses, and communities should expose different possibilities within the main conflict. Give each significant encounter a function: temptation, warning, judgment, aid, contrast, or revelation. If removing a figure changes nothing, combine, deepen, or cut that role.
- Let the ending measure cost. Completion alone is rarely enough. Ask what has been preserved, lost, misunderstood, or passed onward. An ending can remain open while still feeling shaped if it clarifies the human or communal price of the journey.
During revision, outline the draft scene by scene and note the purpose, pace, dominant image, and emotional change of each section. Cut episodes that repeat an earlier function without increasing pressure. Then read the poem aloud to a listener who does not know the plan. Ask where attention weakens, where transitions confuse, and which images remain afterward. Revise toward that remembered core rather than toward mere size.
Interesting Facts
- Length does not automatically produce magnitude. A poem can cover vast distances yet feel small if events have little consequence. Conversely, a selectively told journey can suggest an enormous world through implication, recurring places, and the visible effects of decisions.
- Digression can strengthen rather than interrupt the design. A side story, remembered ancestor, local legend, or secondary voice may widen the poem's moral field. The key is return: the apparent detour should change how readers understand the central action when it resumes.
- Elevation has more than one sound. Ceremonial diction can create grandeur, but plain speech can make extraordinary circumstances feel immediate and credible. Experienced poets often vary registers, allowing public declarations, private doubts, humor, and grief to coexist without flattening the voice.
- Repetition serves as a form of navigation. In an extended poem, recurring phrases, images, and situations help readers remember earlier episodes. Their real power comes from alteration: the same words can sound hopeful, ironic, or devastating after the central figure has changed.
- Readers may remember one human detail more vividly than an entire conflict. A worn shoe, an unfinished meal, or a hand released at the wrong moment can concentrate the cost of large events. Concrete detail keeps scale from becoming abstraction.
- Silence can carry epic weight. Omissions, pauses, and scenes that end before an answer may suggest trauma, reverence, uncertainty, or knowledge beyond the speaker's reach. Expansion is therefore balanced by restraint; not every mystery benefits from explanation.
- Closure can look backward and forward simultaneously. The final event may resolve an undertaking while leaving consequences for a family, community, or future generation. As you compare community poems, notice whether endings celebrate completion, question it, mourn its cost, or transform victory into a more complicated judgment.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and epic treatment shape each other. A theme suited to this form must be able to develop through action, consequence, and changing perspective rather than remain a single statement. The possibilities below are literary pathways, not statistical rankings of what appears most often in the collection.
- Journeys and returns. Travel provides natural stages, encounters, delays, and altered landscapes. More importantly, the returning figure can discover that home, identity, or memory has changed, allowing the outward route to become an inward measure of transformation.
- Conflict between duty and desire. Epic scale intensifies when a private wish collides with family obligation, public responsibility, belief, or inherited expectation. Each episode can test the conflict differently, preventing the theme from being settled by one easy decision.
- Community origins and collective memory. Stories of founding, migration, survival, or cultural inheritance can connect individual choices to a larger group. Multiple voices and remembered episodes help reveal that communal identity is made through both achievement and exclusion.
- War, rivalry, and contested honor. These subjects offer action, but their deeper value lies in examining loyalty, pride, leadership, sacrifice, and the instability of glory. A strong poem shows consequences beyond the moment of confrontation rather than treating conflict as spectacle alone.
- Loss, descent, and return from crisis. Grief, exile, illness, failure, or an encounter with an altered realm can reorganize the poem's values. The extended movement allows readers to experience not only the fall but also the difficult, incomplete process of carrying knowledge back.
- Spiritual or cosmic questioning. Encounters with fate, mortality, faith, nature, or powers beyond human control can enlarge the moral horizon. Such poems work best when abstract questions are embodied in choices, images, and consequences rather than explained as doctrine.
- Modern arenas of endurance. Sport, school, work, family responsibility, and civic life can receive epic treatment when the poet reveals their rituals, trials, loyalties, and shared stakes. Humor or irony may be especially effective here, testing the distance between grand language and ordinary experience.
As you read the community poems, compare how writers transform similar material through narrative distance, tone, pacing, and image. Two poets may begin with a journey or conflict yet arrive at opposite judgments about courage, sacrifice, belonging, or success.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of an epic lies between magnitude and intimacy. Readers must sense a world extending beyond the immediate scene, yet they also need moments close enough to touch: a bodily sensation, a private doubt, a damaged object, a choice made under pressure. Magnitude without intimacy becomes pageantry; intimacy without widening consequence can make the larger structure feel unnecessary. Memorable poems keep shifting the lens so that public action changes private experience and private decisions reshape the surrounding world.
Structure feels necessary when every major episode tests the poem's governing values from a new angle. A journey is not compelling simply because it contains many stops, nor is a conflict deepened merely by adding opponents. Strong sequencing creates causation, escalation, echo, and reversal. An early promise may become a later burden; an apparent triumph may prepare a moral failure; a minor warning may return with devastating force. Editors notice when recurring images and phrases perform this connective work. They give readers memory inside the poem and make widely separated passages answer one another.
Weak drafts often rely on predictable grandeur. Forced archaisms, constant declarations, inflated adjectives, or mechanically elevated rhythms may announce importance without creating it. Other drafts over-explain the theme, leaving no room for readers to infer meaning from action and image. A chain of adventures can also suffer from insufficient development when none of the episodes changes the central figure or raises the cost. The remedy is not necessarily greater length. It is sharper selection, stronger transitions, more varied pacing, and a clearer understanding of what each scene makes possible that the previous scene did not.
Individuality remains visible through the poet's choices about authority, sympathy, and scale. One writer may admire the central figure while exposing a fatal blindness; another may shift attention toward witnesses, rivals, descendants, or those who pay for celebrated deeds. Humor can question heroic language, while lyric intensity can interrupt public action with private grief. Even the ending reveals an ethical signature: what the poem calls victory, what it mourns, and what it refuses to settle. Comparing multiple community poems develops a better sense of quality because shared conventions make differences easier to perceive. Readers can see which poems merely signal epic ambition and which make that ambition inseparable from voice, image, movement, and consequence.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on a single impression of the form. Compare how each poet creates scale, handles the central journey, varies narrative pace, and measures the cost of achievement. A thoughtful comment can identify a recurring image, a powerful turn, an effective change of distance, or a question the ending leaves productively open.
Then try shaping an epic of your own. Choose material capable of widening through consequence, revise it for movement and memory, and publish the result on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can join the ongoing conversation between poets who preserve familiar expectations, adapt them to contemporary experience, or challenge them from within.
Collection Statistics
With 2711 poems available to browse, this collection offers many opportunities to compare narrative scale, voice, pacing, imagery, characterization, and closure. The poems should not be treated as interchangeable models or assumed to follow conventions identically. Some poets may work closely within familiar expectations, while others may adapt, compress, reinterpret, or challenge them. Reading across the collection helps visitors recognize both the form's shared pressures and the individual decisions that give each poem its character.
Epic Categories
Read wonderful epic poetry on the following sub-topics:
basketball, christmas, death, 8th grade, friendship, food, funny, heroes, kids, life, love, middle school, music, rhyme, school, sports
and more.
Definition | What is Epic in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.