Pieces of Hope to the Echo of the World (French: Parcelles d'espoir à l'echo de ce monde^[1]) is reputedly the longest modern handwritten poem in the world, unveiled on 4 August 2006 by its author, French public notary Patrick Huet. It comprises 7 547 verses and is reported to be almost 1 km (0.621 mi) long, at 994.1 m.^[2] An Embossed Notary Seal. ... km redirects here. ... A mile is a unit of length, usually used to measure distance, in a number of different systems, including Imperial units, United States customary units and Swedish/Norwegian mil. ... The metre, or meter (U.S.), is a measure of length. ...

The poem takes the form of an acrostic, in which the initials of each line collectively spell out the 30 articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The display of the work was unveiled before a court official in Lyon, so that the poem could be considered for inclusion in Guiness World Records. An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichon, from ákros, extreme, and stíchos, verse) is a poem or other text written in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each verse, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. ... Year 1948 (MCMXLVIII) was a leap year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1948 calendar). ... Eleanor Roosevelt with the Spanish version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: (Arpitan: Forward, forward, Lyon the best) Location Coordinates Time Zone CET (GMT +1) Administration Country France Region Rhône-Alpes Department Rhône (69) Subdivisions 9 arrondissements Intercommunality Urban Community of Lyon Mayor Gérard Collomb  (PS) (since 2001) City Statistics Land area... Suresh Joachim, minutes away from breaking the ironing world record at 55 hours and 5 minutes, at Shoppers World, Brampton. ...

There remain other, far longer epic poems, such as the Indian Mahabharata and Persian Shahnameh, although these are far older. The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, which retells in a continuous narrative the life and works of a heroic or mythological person or group of persons. ... Mahabharat redirects here. ... Shahnameh Scenes from the Shahnameh carved into reliefs at Tus, where Ferdowsi is buried. ...

References

1. ^ "Paris Diary", 4 July 2006, The Guardian. Available from http://politics.guardian.co.uk/backbench/comment/0,,1812163,00.html.
2. ^ "Frenchman displays world's longest poem", 5 August 2006, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Available from http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200608/s1706896.htm