‘The topic of human constructions of temporality’, writes Roland Racevskis,

It is via ‘the unpredictable angles of approach provided by the aesthetic activity of figuration’, Racevskis suggests, that many of the complexities and fundamental paradoxes of time (as it is encountered and perceived by humans) can be apprehended. I hope that I have shown how productive the varied angles of approach available to the long poem can be in exploring the multiple ways in which humans can construct temporality. The capacity of the long poem, more than any other type of text, to act simultaneously as a spatial and as a temporal form – as a region in which to wander and as an unfolding process – enables it to ‘figure’ in its very form multiple constructions of temporality, and to recreate these in the reader’s experience. Add to this the other ‘angles of approach’ that literary texts use to think about time – theme and content, revision, allusion – and the long poem is uniquely positioned to address the topic. The ‘questions of intellectual history’ about time that long poems have been used to address include questions about free will, scientific or religious understandings of nonhuman nature, and the continuity of human identity. Whether the poems I have been looking at provide ‘answers’ to these questions is debatable, but they do make visible the temporal paradoxes inherent in such questions.

Accordingly, I have been treating these poems both as parts of a continuum and as individual entities. Each constructs its own characteristic temporality according to the priorities of its author and the intellectual debates of its contemporary moment, but each also forms a part of a longer tradition. The long poem certainly did not disappear in the nineteenth century, in spite of Edgar Allan Poe’s notorious proclamation: