>> Dr. Johnson on Paradise Lost: "No man has ever complained that it was too short." <<
A direct result of the pernicious practice of paying poets by the word. Originally, "Paradise Lost" was a haiku -- one of the earliest in the English language....
Satan, Adam, Eve,
what a hullaballoo! They
made a lot of fuss.
But when Milton was informed he would be paid a mere 12 pence for this monumental effort (@ 1 penny per word), he exclaimed, "Screw that, I'm writing a goddam epic!"
Ideally, poets would be paid to shut up, so that whatever they wrote would be deducted from their pay. The business of poetry would then resemble the business of life as conceptualized by the Greeks: "the only thing better than dying young is never to have been born at all."
But, seriously, the greatest poems in a tradition are always going to be long poems. The modernist preference for short lyrics is, in perspective, a concession to the necessarily fragmentary nature of modern experience. Pieces of an exploded puzzle.
Well, this post is already way too long...... the meter is running!
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