Post-modernist …

… “To Crawl Under the Earth”: The Persistence of Expansive Poetry.

Since modernism, the dividing line between lyric and narrative had tended to blur. Expansive poets defined narrative as the linguistic or verbal presentation of a sequence of fictionalized, non-autobiographical events (plot) concerning recognizable characters (protagonists), whether imagined or historical, who faced conflicts that must be contended with, overcome, or somehow resolved. Expansive poets wrote narratives in meter and rhyme, meter alone (usually blank verse), and in tightly controlled free verse. Unlike modernists, Expansive poets made a clear distinction between narrative poems, which could be written in any form and at any length, and lyric poems, which were typically brief and song-like.