Clive,
thanks for correcting my silly generalization which is indeed a dubious critical cliche.
I do think there is an element of truth in it, but it would take more than a sound-byte to work that out. Just as long poems don't fare well on these boards, neither do long arguments.
Anyway, here's my sound-byte genealogy of long poems:
Dante: fully integrated
Shakespeare: consciously disintegrating
Milton: wilfully integrated (religious tour-de-force in a secularizing age)
Eliot: juxtaposition of unintegrated, unintegratable fragments ("these fragments have I shored against my ruins")
Maybe the more telling distinction would be, not that between long & short poems, but that between narrative & lyric. "The Waste Land," I think Pound quipped, is "the longest lyric poem in the language" (or something like that).
>> Anyway, to put it in less grandiose terms, I just wonder if we sometimes complain too much about these things! <<
Hey, I ain't complaining, just wondering about our interesting situation. To be in a fragmented phase of a creative process is by no means necessarily a bad thing. It might be transitional to a higher-level integration. "solve et coagula" -- the alchemists' method -- is always the way.
>> In the world of forms Nature's "mode of operation" consists of a continuous rhythm of "dissolutions" and "coagulations," or of disintegrations and formations, so that the dissolution of any formal entity is but the preparation for a new conjunction between a forma and its materia. Nature acts like Penelope who, to rid herself of unworthy suitors, unwound at night the wedding garment which she had woven during the day. In this way too the alchemist works. Following the adage solve et coagula, he dissolves the imperfect coagulations of the soul, reduces the latter to its materia, and crystallizes it anew in a nobler form. << [Titus Burckhardt, "Alchemy"]
Seeing things as phases of a creative process rather than as ideological stakes in the ground is sometimes helpful.
[This message has been edited by AE (edited April 17, 2002).]
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