As a decidedly American tradition, the long poem has become the premier literary endeavor for poets in the twentieth-century. Writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams have pursued the long poem, but under the auspices of the modern epic. Three postmodern long poems---Kenneth Koch\u27s Seasons on Earth, Edward Dom\u27s Gunslinger, and James Merrill\u27s The Changing Light at Sandover---illustrate a dramatic rupture with the texts of modernism by introducing comic situations and multi-voiced narration---situations described by Mikhail Bakhtin as dialogism and carnival, receptively---into the canon of American long poems. These innovations allow the postmodern long poem to evolve past the thematic and aesthetic strictures imposed by the texts of modernism
