Book excerpt: First published in 1999, this is a guide which provides easy access to a fairly complete range of the long poetry written in the Romantic and Victorian periods: epics, narrative poems, verse-novels and other work of over a certain length. The format provides title, author, length of work and prosodic description. Texts are then summarized according to the internal divisions. Each poem is accompanied by an objective summary and the poems as a whole are preceded by an introduction which advances a particular argument as to why the nineteenth century was so fascinated with the length that was the ultimate aesthetic rationale for the long poem.