I recollect William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, as
coming in at approx. 42,000 lines. His friends found it
soporific in the extreme, and it is a frame or tales or
time-killing poem like The Canterbury Tales. The frame is
hardly as strong as that in the Divine Comedy or for that
matter The Faerie Queene, but it does have a point--a kind
of Valhalla of storytelling, an afterlife where that is
pretty much all the deceased do--as it were for a thousand
and one years, or knights. Jim N.
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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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