For centuries, critics, poets, and philosophers have either openly proclaimed or tacitly assumed the long poem as the highest expression of literary ambition and excellence. Rethinking the North American Long Poem focuses on the North American variant of this notorious form - notorious because of its often forbidding and difficult character. The contributors scrutinize seminal works and more recent efforts that have redefined or, better still, reopened the case of the long poem. Taking the categories of form, matter, and experiment as frames of conceptual reference, the book examines the ways in which material and immaterial aspects of literary practice and the philosophically and politically inscribed duality of experience and experiment are negotiated in and by North American long poems from the nineteenth century to the present.