The modernist preference for short lyrics is, in perspective, a concession to the necessarily fragmentary nature of modern experience. Pieces of an exploded puzzle.
I sometimes think we overplay the idea that modern (modernist?) poets have a preference for short lyrics. A great deal (most?) of the poetry written in English in the past - say - four hundred years has amounted to "short lyrics" - or, to stretch things a little, meditative poems of around fifty or sixty lines. A long poem, as Michael Juster remarks further up this thread, is "a noble but difficult thing", and for this reason alone will always be a comparative rarity.
Also, the idea that "modern experience" has a "necessarily fragmentary nature" which somehow obliges poets to offer the "Pieces of an exploded puzzle" is also questionable. In every age, writers - all human beings - have made what sense they could of their experiences. Without, for example, the unquestioned and unquestionable props of established religion (I speak of the UK), men and women seek out other sources of meaning and coherence. Nor should we assume that people in the past did not find their experiences confusing or fragmentary: they did, and it is easy to show this. What is more, beneath what may appear to be their seamless surfaces, the "great" long poems of previous centuries (I would include the plays of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries in this) often conceal - and sometimes imperfectly, at that - all manner of fault-lines and fragmentarinesses.
And what about the following poems, all composed in the past eighty years? (To tease, I omit the names of the authors and give the titles alphabetically.) All run to several pages, sometimes to scores of pages or whole volumes: "A Furnace", "A Letter from Li Po", "Anathémata", "Auroras of Autumn", "Autumn Journal", "Briggflatts", "Correspondences", "Funeral Music", "His Dog and His Pilgrim", "Idaho Out", "Implements in Their Places", "In Parentheses", "Lachrimae", "Mercian Hymns", "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", "Paterson", "Preludes for Memnon", "The Cantos", "The Crystal", "The Donkey’s Ears", "The Four Quartets", "The Maximus Poems", "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy", "The Sea and the Mirror", "The Sleeping Lord", "The Waste Land", "Time in the Rock", "Valhalla".
All of these long poems were conceived as integrated texts. Each writer adopted his or her own approach to sense-making. Fragmentariness on the page does not necessarily imply incoherence: even a fragmented account of experiences deemed by the writer to be fragmented may, by the miraculous "framing" of art, be rendered into aesthetic coherence. To quote anonymously again, our experiences may well seem fractured to us until we "mend them into art".
Anyway, to put it in less grandiose terms, I just wonder if we sometimes complain too much about these things!
Clive Watkins
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