![]() ![]() The great religious or quasi-religious poems-think Donne, Herbert, or Hopkins Verlaine, Claudel, or Francis Jammes Matthias Claudius, Hölderlin, or Novalis-are short. The philosophical poem, too, is easily outdone by prose even Lucretius reads nicely in a good prose translation, and can you imagine anything worse than Heidegger in verse? The same for metaphysics. The philosophical poem, too, is easily outdone by prose. ![]() As a nonheroic narrative, the long poem is even more cumbersome: think of those shipwrecked Robinsons, Edwin Arlington and Jeffers, whom no one now thinks of rescuing. Once it did, it was goodbye, epic poetry. Others followed because it was the tradition, and because the novel in prose had not yet caught on. Homer resorted to verse as a mnemonic device in a largely preliterate age. ![]() Prose can do its job, with some minor losses, much better. Yet the plot is not a basic constituent of the poetic, except perhaps as a hurdle. What is perspicuous is how much most of these depend on plot: how many nonacademics push beyond the Inferno or plod on to Paradise Regained? When we, here and now, think “long poem,” we usually mean Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, maybe Blake, and probably Yeats and Eliot. And, of course, in any combination of the above. ![]() The long poem, if we rightly exclude the dramatic, comes in three varieties: narrative, including epic philosophical, including existential and metaphysical, including religious. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |