Julia Budenz, author of one poem in five volumes

Once a nun, then a classics scholar, Ms. Budenz was a poet whose work consists of a single poem with a length that flouts convention and strains imagination. Divided into five volumes, “Flora Baum’’ appears destined to be about 1,700 pages, once friends finish reviewing the remaining manuscripts. Extrapolating from published excerpts, the poem should exceed 2 million words and possibly top 3 million.

“If Emily Dickinson was the great New England poet of the small, Julia is the great New England poet of the great,’’ said Frederick Turner, Founders professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. “She has written what may be the longest poem in the world, and she’s doing things with poetry that people have never done before.’’

In an echo of years spent in a convent half a century ago, her writing life was something of a spiritual discipline practiced in a Cambridge apartment laden with books and stuffed with papers that document each line of her poem. Ms. Budenz died Dec. 11 in the Elizabeth Evarts de Rham Hospice in Cambridge. She was 76 and was diagnosed with abdominal cancer earlier this year.

“I guess what interested me over the years was how Julia was willing to give up all other aspects of life in order to pursue this poem,’’ said her sister Josephine Palermo of Los Altos, Calif. “She lived a very austere life. At one time she said, ‘The poem is my life.’ As her sister, sometimes it worried me, and sometimes I was in awe of it.’’

While Ms. Budenz used the narrative of “Flora Baum’’ to create a dialogue across the centuries with other writers of epic poems, such as Dante Alighieri, John Milton, and Virgil, she also incorporated everyday experiences from daily walks, during which she drew inspiration from trees she passed.

“She didn’t live on this lofty plane all the time,’’ said Roger Sinnott of Chelmsford, who is helping coordinate publication of the “Flora Baum’’ manuscripts. “She was just a very friendly, regular type of person. And she had this exceptional knowledge of trees. She would point out a tree in my yard and say, ‘Oh, I love your linden tree.’ ’’

Ms. Budenz, Turner said, “had a kind flow of joy that came largely, I think, from her long walks and her enormous admiration of the great trees of Cambridge.’’

In a passage from an excerpt published in 1984 Ms. Budenz writes:

What is that behind me?

Who is that walking behind me?

Those are the first footsteps

Of the first fallen leaves.

The late poet Amy Clampitt, in her 1991 book of essays, “Predecessors, Et Cetera,’’ wrote that upon first reading “Flora Baum’’ excerpts, “such a work in progress is likely to be baffling. But with each installment, and still more with rereading, I have found newly thrilling a poem whose design is not entirely revealed, but whose execution is wonderfully various, beguiling, and funny.’’

The poem, she added, “is part of a vision of how everything connects, of how it is possible at any moment to step from the everyday into the sacred, and back again.’’

Born in New York City, Ms. Budenz grew up in Astoria, a neighborhood in Queens. Her parents were ardent communists who split with the party when she was a child and converted to Catholicism.

“Julia claims that she was more drawn to the mystical, rather than the concrete practice of Catholicism,’’ her sister said.

For Ms. Budenz, education in Catholic girls’ schools included graduating in 1952 from the Ursuline School in New Rochelle, N.Y., where she won awards for Latin scholarship. She majored in classics at the College of New Rochelle, from which she graduated in 1956, and then entered the Ursuline novitiate.

Scholarship exerted a stronger pull than her aspiration to be a nun, however, and she entered graduate studies en route to leaving the order several years later.

Ms. Budenz received master’s degrees in classics from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and in comparative literature from Harvard.

She taught college courses and ended up in Cambridge, where she assisted I. Bernard Cohen, a Harvard professor, and Anne Whitman, a classicist, who in 1999 published a new translation of Isaac Newton’s “The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.’’

By then, Ms. Budenz had been writing “Flora Baum’’ for about three decades. She envisioned her poem as five gardens, or five books that make up a whole, and believed writing produces a sort of familial trinity.

“One’s literary work is offspring and parent and self,’’ she wrote in a 1997 essay posted at www.poetryporch.com/jbessay.html, where long excerpts of “Flora Baum’’ can be found.

For all the words she committed to the page, though, she was not fond of dissecting her work or motives.

“One should not write about one’s work,’’ she wrote. “One cannot write about one’s work. The poem presents itself. Its critics and historians must be its biographers.’’

Turner, who met Ms. Budenz a few times and corresponded with her, saw in her more than simply ambition.

“From a technical point of view, she’s an absolute master of poetry,’’ he said. “Her understanding of poetic form is staggering and incredibly inventive. She’s a sort of Mozart of meter.’’

The poem’s title character can be viewed as an alter ego for the writer, who takes readers on an odyssey from a biblical Eden though Greek and Roman classical civilizations to Scotland and “the garden of the whole’’ that, Ms. Budenz wrote, is “most fully placed in Flora Baum’s native America but also situated in her native world, in her homeland the earth, in her home the universe. It is the book of the elm, rooted and reaching.’’

A service will be announced for Ms. Budenz, who in addition to her sister leaves two other sisters, Justine of London and Joanna Gallegos of San Francisco.

Emily Lyle, a longtime friend and a professor in the department of Celtic and Scottish studies at the University of Edinburgh, said that while Ms. Budenz “was good company and her poetry was often amusing,’’ her Cambridge apartment “literally is full of books and papers. People had to creep around the edges, but that’s what she needed, and she needed that badly. She needed her books and papers all around her.’’

Though a touch of mischievousness could be sensed in Ms. Budenz, “there was something ghostly always about her as if she was inhabited by somebody else,’’ Turner said. “And I suppose she was — by Flora.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.