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A Discussion on Long Poems

by Julian Woodruff 

In her second comment to the thread trailing my recent poem “The Heavy Launch of the Siegfried Idyll” (July 29), Margaret Coats suggested I “begin a conversation on LONG POEMS,” since, while responding to Joseph Salemi’s marvelous “Jeweler’s Deposition” (July 23), I had asked a commenter, Mr. Raghunathan, why by his admission he declined to read poems of that length as a rule. (The poem is 109 lines of blank verse.) Mr. Raghunathan expresses no distaste, it turns out—he simply feels he can’t often spare the time (at least to read as carefully as he would like).

Many contributors to this website are more competent than I am to start a discussion on the topic of longer poems and their reception. I confess to being slightly chagrined at Mr. Raghunathan’s disinclination. I am irked by the frequency with which I see the cautionary note “up to 40 lines” in the submission guidelines on poetry websites. And if Ms. Coats is right about the 50% reduction in readers’ attention span from the days of Poe to the present, without going into the causes (at least for the moment) I would say that decline is truly deplorable (without meaning to exclude myself altogether from that downward trend!). It’s easy, by the way, to posit a connection between my concern here and the general decline of moral and spiritual energy we see about us, as noted in Mr. Yapko’s “Entropy,” posted to the Society’s website 8/7/2023. What can we do, as writers in the present milieu, to reverse the situation?

I know, some sites do welcome longer poems (sometimes indicating there are no limits whatever), but they seem few in number, not necessarily sympathetic to the formal approach our SCP community values, and when their issues appear, evidently not so committed to longer poetry as their guidelines suggest. This community may disregard “verse novels” (as far as I know) as examples of longer poetry, but can it be said that there is a sizable number of poets creating works of, say, two hundred lines to book length, and do their collective productions reflect a vigorous variety of subject matter, style, form etc.?

Where, on the web, can one regularly find longer descriptive or narrative poetry, or even a poem published in installments? There must be some examples out there, but others more knowledgeable than I must weigh in to provide answers. I welcome any such information, as well as all thoughts on this particular literary plight (in addition to those Mr. A.B. Brown may express on his podcast). An ancillary concern of mine, I’ll add in closing, is how children’s literature, at least in the U.S., is evolving. If anyone can relate their impressions on this front to the questions I pose, I’d guess readers would welcome the comment.

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Post your comments below. 

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80 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    I did not find your poem long. As long as there is great rhyme and rhythm, as in your poem, I would cheerfully have read double or triple that amount. If I cannot find rhyme in the first verse or first few lines, I am gone. Evan stated in the “Journal of the SCP” for this year that meter was his first priority for classical poetry, while I place rhyme paramount. Meter is often subject to regional accents, for one thing. I extremely dislike blank verse of any kind no matter how great the subject is and how well treated. I consider the supposed poet did not have the discipline to at least attempt to make it rhyme. While some of my comments go beyond the initial discussion points, I wanted to share them anyway.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Thank you for the praise, Mr. Peterson, but on your distaste for blank verse, where does that leave (e.g.) Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s plays, to consider only works in English? If one associates rhyme with song, then Milton and Shakespeare must have wanted to limit its domain. There are of course complete plays and epics in rhyme, but for whatever reasons they haven’t garnered the praise that M & S have. How can one say “well treated” to one piece of work, and “junk” to another?

      Reply
      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        Paradise remains lost and I only count the sonnets of Shakespeare as poetry, although I revel in the verses that are rhymed in Romeo and Juliet and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In most of Shakespeare’s plays there was little rhyme, although the meter tended to be iambic pentameter. I think he used up all the small one and two-syllable words in the English dictionary of the times to accomplish that. I was perturbed when I had to read Milton in High School, If something rhymed, it was by accident, so I did not associate it with poetry.

  2. Margaret Coats

    Hello, Julian, glad to see this as a post in its own right (thank you, Evan). For starters, let me reiterate what I said on Julian’s Siegfried Idyll post. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) expressed the idea that readers could manage 100 lines of verse at a single sitting. When I quoted that sometime ago, Joe Salemi gave his opinion that attention spans have decreased to the point that readers are only willing to read 50 lines at a time. From looking at first-day responses to SCP poems, I suspect that is the case. Shorter poems are likely to get more immediate attention, although response can even out over time when readers have leisure to consider a longer poem. That does require readers to plan on reading and to come back to the longer work. I am most grateful to those who take time to read my poems, which are rarely as short as a sonnet. And I am even more appreciative of those who comment and say they have read the work several times.

    I can give more responses to Julian’s questions later, because I don’t have time to specify them right now!

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      I do hope you’ll add more when you get the chance, Margaret.

      Reply
  3. Phil S. Rogers

    I would agree with Ms. Coates and Mr. Salemi’s statement on a 50% reduction in people’s attention span since the days of Poe. But, I have to believe that the larger part of this 50% has happened within the last 50 years, for a number of reasons, including computers, social media, and our education system. Please feel free to refute my thinking.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Mr. Rogers, you may be right. At any rate, I think we’re talking about a phenomenon that belongs to the post-WWII era(s). Fairly or unfairly, I associate the decline with the introduction of controlled vocabulary in kids’ books. The Cat in the Hat is some kind of miracle, but it and its sequel are almost the last we saw of the true Dr. Seuss, rhyming magician. A few other children’s writers do very well with the limited verbal fare, but I’m not sure that they’re giving readers the chance to really stretch that might eventually lead to … well … reading Pope and Chaucer, to say nothing of Dante.

      Reply
    • Cheryl Corey

      I agree with you, Phil. I think the problem with attention span has worsened since the Internet. We’re bombarded with information and data; and the non-stop news cycle doesn’t help either. I’ve noticed in recent years that my own attention span feels shorter. When I read books now, I use a bookmark under the line to maintain focus.

      Reply
      • Julian D. Woodruff

        A corollary to your thought, Ms. Corey:
        A test of one’s attention span and concentration is memory. One could produce a whole anthology of anecdotes around feats of memory, and perhaps this has been done more than once. Speaking for myself, I used to be good with faces, bad with names. Now I’m terrible with both. I can watch an entire movie without realizing I’ve seen it before, whereas my wife will often know it’s a repeat before the end of the 1st scene.

  4. Joshua C. Frank

    I agree with the other commenters. I loved “Jeweler’s Deposition” and would still have enjoyed hundreds more lines. I don’t have a problem with blank verse as long as the poem is good; I prefer rhyme over no rhyme, but I prefer meter without rhyme over rhyme without meter.

    I agree that attention spans have decreased to the point where people can only stand to read 50 lines… perhaps even less than that given how many magazines I’ve submitted to with 40-line limits. I agree that most of this is since television, and especially the Internet and smartphones, became popular; Georges Brassens (1921-1981) routinely sang songs over 50, and sometimes approaching 100, lines of French verse (French requires about 20% more syllables to say the same thing, judging from the fact that alexandrine verse corresponds to iambic pentameter in English), and he’s been as popular there as the Beatles in the English-speaking world.

    Also, I like classic verse novels, but modern verse novels are mostly woke free verse, with the occasional woke rhyming verse novel with crappy meter. The only thing worse than modern “poetry” is long modern “poetry.” Long poems these days are rare, and given the state of poetry today, that’s a blessing!

    To answer your question, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it unless we can persuade people to quit, or at least use less, the modern technologies that shorten their attention spans. Unless I work with a specific form, when I write a poem, it’s as long as it needs to be. Mine usually range from 8 to 36 lines, averaging about 20, but sometimes I write longer ones because they need to be longer. I’m working on branching out into longer forms because some ideas I have require longer poems, and I believe many of my readers like my poems enough to take the time to read longer ones of mine.

    While we want to get our messages across and can do this most effectively with short poems, I believe that by writing longer poems along with them, we can get people interested in longer poems. One of my readers told me she doesn’t even read poetry but finds mine inspiring and sends it to her family and friends. Based on this experience, I believe we can start a trend of including longer poems.

    Reply
    • ABB

      I agree with you about being powerless unless we can convince people to decrease their tech use, Joshua. Fat chance, obviously. But I got rid of my television last Christmas, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I am so much more productive now.
      I also feel, though, like the current state of our citizenry is just not sustainable—can society really continue to persist, much less thrive, when people are THIS STUPID? A functioning republic requires people do more than just stare at screens. I have to believe that whatever culture arises after America will be better, and in looking for models in the past will be inspired by the best of what was there. But I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong…maybe there is no coming back from this and it will just be a dystopian nightmare.

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        Yes, I’ve become so much more productive since I’ve mostly quit the Internet except for the SCP and other magazines where I’m a regular. But the addiction was so strong that it took years to get to this point (in fact, the story behind my poem “The Phony Mom” was what made me decide to quit).

        I think our culture is already dead and replaced by an anti-culture that can’t survive for more than a few generations. I think the only survivors will be devout Christians living a more agrarian life, following the formula I describe in “The Renegade Poet:”

        “Large families, small communities, the Church—
        The simple country life for which I search.”

        That’s really the only sustainable way to live.

      • Julian D. Woodruff

        Mr. Brown
        I read a piece today about what has happened to US public schools. I fear it might be accurate to say that if one watches tv (of whatever quality) for half an hour and can accurately summarize what one has seen, that person is better off than a large percentage of public school students.
        And so, arguably, we are living a dystopian nightmare.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        We’ve been a dystopian nightmare for a long time. Especially for the unborn.

      • C.B. Anderson

        You’re right, ABB, we don’t know what is going to happen, but there are a couple of things we do know: Nothing good will happen if nobody stands up, and stupidity, as it happens, has actually lasted quite a long time. On the other hand, this all might end at any time.

    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Interesting comment, Mr. Frank. You mention “branching out into longer forms”: would you be willing to post an example or two of such form(s), explain, if it’s not obvious, how they are forms, rather than a rhymed free-flow, so to speak (like one I sent in recently that Evan rejected)? Or perhaps some are extensions of a shorter form–a discussion of how something like this came about would be intriguing.

      Reply
  5. A.B. Brown

    I would agree with Mr. Rogers that the main culprit is the rise of modern technology, combined with A Deweyite educational system that emphasizes practical training over being cultured. In the days before television, people got their stories from book-form narratives. In traditional societies this often meant narratives in verse.

    I always hear the argument “I don’t have time to read”—to say nothing of more than 50 lines of poetry—but then these same people are just sitting in front of their televisions or staring at their computers/phones for hours. I understand they’re tired from work and want to veg out a little bit, but screen time is through the roof (I should distinguish between passive screen time rather than active, like this).

    I imagine that Joe’s comment about people being willing to read 50 lines of poetry in one sitting applies to those within the current educated poetry world, while for the typical illiterati, that average is about the length of a tweet or Instagram post (of prosy free verse, of course).

    I know I’m a fringe exception, but I just spent a few hours the other night reading fifty pages of ‘The Argonautica’ without stopping. I have to believe there are at least a few others out there like me, though, who just read long narrative verse for fun, and whose attention span is greater than that of mice. I think ultimately, a real artist needs to just needs to create the type of art he/she wants to see more of in the world.

    Great books tend to be little read–that Mark Twain quote comes to mind. I hardly ever meet anyone who has read ‘The Faerie Queene,’ much less Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso.’ A chapter in the latter, about the siege of Paris, is over 1500 lines long. But though they may sit on dusty shelves, these are genuinely great books, and the world is better off having them whether the mice-people appreciate it or not.

    Just recorded an episode (which I am editing now) where I briefly touch on the decline of heroic verse narratives that were once rife in the pre-modern world and are now nonexistent, as a contrast to the type of crappy poetry people are taught to write in MFA programs. I only touch on the subject though and would like to do an episode more in depth about this. So maybe can use some of the comments here to do that.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      I must admit, Mr. Brown, I find your take on the current literary climate, especially for poetry, depressing. Not off the mark, I don’t think; but if people can tear through 700-page beach reads, I’ll credit them with greater attention spans than I’ve got, and I don’t expect anyone in love with Tasso or Petrarch to churn out something that would excite such readers, I think the world of poetry would be a healthier one if there was a range in poetic production that would attract them as well–and not necessarily bad (although for the sake of the literary culture as a whole I might take that, too) if not “highbrow.”
      From cataloging for the California Sheet Music Project (consisting of popular sheet music published in CA, 1862-1900) several years ago, I remember least 1-2 songs that ran on to 40 lines or more. People would enjoy learning and singing such doggerel, perhaps even memorizing it. Call them lucky that they had no iphones, no Blackberries, no tv–whatever. But they used this stuff to amuse or console themselves, to remind themselves of some important event etc. And some of them at least read other poetry, too–Shakespeare, Poe, especially the psalms.
      If we all do our own thing, we do indeed have a considerable variety. Let’s hope we can eventually attract members to this community who will increase that variety still further, on this site or perhaps more appropriately elsewhere.

      Reply
      • ABB

        Ha yes, I suppose I am a bit of a downer, Julian. Really, I hope I’m wrong. I’ll continue to ignore the trend myself. There IS a great variety of stuff on this site as it is.
        Regarding your query about children’s literature, I think that this form is exempt from the trend. I’m not really up on the current state of children’s poetry, but I know kids still love Dr. Seuss. When I read ‘One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish’ to my niece at night, sometimes I’ll read it through 2 or 3 times before she falls asleep–when I finish it, she always wants me to start again. And since she’s very young, she hasn’t yet learned what kind of poetry you’re “supposed” to like as an adult.
        I will offer a contemporary example, though: a poet associated with the SCP, Michael Pietrack, published an epic fable about a bee’s journey called ‘Legacy.’ I seem to recall it is around 5,500 lines long or so. Was talking with him on the phone not too long ago, and when he told me how much he’s made off of it just in the six months or so since it’s been out, my jaw almost hit the floor. Despite this success, though, a bigger publisher is still reluctant to pick it up so he just promotes it himself. The publishing world remains biased against formalism even when there is a concrete example of a commercially successful work out there undercutting their assumptions.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        The publishing world hates anything that doesn’t push leftism, let alone something as boldly traditional as formal poetry. That’s why we’ve established a parallel poetry world among SCP members.

  6. .Sally Cook

    This is an interesting topic indeed. Advertising has been a major culprit in the change from long to short poems, but I would place more blame on our changing concept of time. How many people do any of us know who constantly traverse the globe and consider this quite normal? The previous two centuries were more sane in that time moved at a slower pace. Any poem moves at its own pace, and it is a given that the shorter the poem the less opportunity for glaring errors.

    I enjoy the sonnet and have tried to arrange my life in a way which reflects paragraphs (stanzas) which gracefully unfold an idea. Others have an ability to express multi-leveled ideas in other forms. I respect such work, but it is not my way or working. Really, length of a respective poems . is a secondary issue at best; consideration of the entire idea – does the form fit it, how does the rhyme or non-rhyme suit the nuances of the language’; those are more important to me than a question of brevity or length.

    Not so long ago I received a call from an English professor informing me that she would henceforth be discontinuing reading short four line rhyming quatrains. Period. End of sentence. Since most of my work falls in that category, I took it as a not so subtle insult.

    And then I remembered that hers was one of those woke English departments which were trying to “get rid” of the Sonnet, and understood.

    Hi, there Ms. poet !
    We’re after the sonnet,
    Be fearful and know it
    Just put on your bonnet,
    Hitch buggy to mare-
    Get the H out of there.

    What a rigid, childish response to an absent challenge !
    I replied with thanks for her notification and informed the woman that when she changed her mind we would still be here.
    Right, Will ?

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Yours is a totally valid perspective Ms. Cook, especially the point about each individual finding the mode of expression that best suits their talents and disposition.
      Same with your comment about the relative unimportance of long vs. short, except that we face a general disinclination to tolerate length, a disinclination that I think is over-stimulated by the publishing world. To turn momentarily to ground where my footing is surer (and mention two ogres from the world of music) Webern, who never published anything longer than eleven minutes, could listen (I’m certain) to the entirety of any Mahler symphony with utter concentration, while Morton Feldman, at least two of whose string quartets last for hours, probably listened with pleasure and discernment to anything of Webern’s he heard. I hope this isn’t just a “so what” observation. I think that kind of readiness for intellectual and emotional stimulation in the literary realm is something we should hope for and be pleased to have had a part in effecting.

      Reply
      • Sally Cook

        Dear Mr. Woodruff –
        Glad you brought music into it. My grandmother, who was an early performer at Chautauqua Institution during the latter decades of the 1800s, simply loved music. Classically trained at the New England Conservatory, she delighted in Gershwin, and could go with lightening speed from Mahler to the complete score of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, something called the Black Key Mazurka to a spirited rendition of The Owl and the Pussycat.
        Point being this woman loved music !
        !
        form or length with which we are concerned today ARE IMPORTANT. I
        it was the music that mattered, then and now, I’m saying that in order to get the public interested in form in poetry, to wake up the editors, we will have to write uniformly exciting poetry. Can we?

        The onus is on us. Can we find a way back? Nobody knows;
        For that you must have a reading public, and people are being deliberately dumbed down. Illiteracy is in fashion and in flower; I t has become the norm.

        We are sorely in need of a return to classical education, But how can that happen when most teachers have been seduced into playing God with the supposed sexual preferences of small children?

  7. Shaun C. Duncan

    I have published many poems here at the SCP which have been between 60 and 90 lines long. Perhaps more people would have read them if they were shorter, but I really couldn’t care less. Writing to suit the tastes of an entirely imaginary audience is an act of artistic cowardice and a sure-fire way to cripple your own work. If writing longer poems results in my work remaining unread, then let it be unread; finer poets than I have suffered such a fate in their lifetimes. Thankfully, my longer works here have been received with more generosity than I ever anticipated by poets I greatly admire and that’s enough for me.

    The Poe quote about 100 lines that gets thrown around needs a little more context. Poe said a lot of things (in another essay he concludes that the only subject fit for poetry is the grief of a lover over the death a young, beautiful woman) and he seemed to relish serving up inflammatory opinions as a critic. He also had a particular dislike for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote long poems. In Poe’s essay he makes no concessions: Paradise Lost and The Illiad do not “work” as a poems but rather are long narratives set in verse which contain short bursts of “poetry”. This entirely artificial and oh-so-precious distinction between poetry and “mere verse” has a long history, going back as far as Aristotle, and was ultimately a key line of argument in the justification of free verse – which should give you some idea of what a bad line of thinking it is.

    I’m sure Dr Salemi will clarify his own remark, but I imagine it was simply a quip about people’s attention spans these days and I very much doubt that he’d want it to be taken as a rule for poetic composition. You won’t find anyone alive who’ll advocate more forcefully for pushing back against the constraints of modern poetry than Joe.

    The perception that longer poems don’t “work” also seems silly to me because the fact is that most people these days will not read poetry at all and the ones who will, by and large, won’t read formalist work. So if you’ve traveled this far out into the margins of respectability, why balk at the idea of writing something more than 50 lines long? And, in a culture as degraded as our own, the notion that a particular course of action is in any way inadvisable creates something of a moral imperative to follow it. Yes, the public’s collective attention span has been stunted by phone-induced autism but poets don’t write for the public or even our peers – we write for posterity.

    Reply
    • Roy Eugene Peterson

      Shaun, I particularly like your note on Poe: “In Poe’s essay he makes no concessions: Paradise Lost and The Illiad do not “work” as a poems but rather are long narratives set in verse which contain short bursts of “poetry”. I absolutely agree. My motto is: If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s a waste of time.

      Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Mr. Duncan,
      Your comment puts me in mind of an essay by the composer Milton Babbitt (a dedicated serialist, for those who don’t know him: “Who cares if they listen?” I have to say, I’ve always distrusted that attitude, and when I was attempting to write music, I found myself writing with the primary intention of impressing myself, which I eventually decided was an unhealthful approach.
      I’m surprised to learn about Poe’s opinion of Milton and Homer. Did he think ill of Shakespeare, Vergil and others, too? If there’s a tradition of separating poets from “versifiers, going as far back as Aristotle, maybe Wilde’s opinion of Byron fits in with that, although I haven’t seen any explanation, from Wilde or anyone else, of what he meant.
      Thanks for an instructive post.

      Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Shaun, neither Poe and Salemi was trying to set a limit on poets (themselves or others). 100 lines then and 50 lines now are practical observations about how much readers of poetry are likely to read without becoming restive. In Poe’s case “at a single sitting” applied both to an individual reading for himself and to someone reading for a group of listeners. As you probably know, and as Brian Yapko points out below, entertainment at home before the radio era was likely to consist of music performed or literature read aloud by the family and guests. There was a social need for intermission, but I imagine a good narrative by Walter Scott might continue for several hundred lines in 100-line increments. My own family read Longfellow, and again, breaks were needed.

      Breaks (not just the total time necessary) represent a major consideration in reading and writing long poems. The poem looks daunting on the page if it is a solid block of print. If there are not stanza breaks, I like line spaces at what might constitute a verse paragraph. This costs more in paper, but less on the reader’s psyche.

      Reply
      • Julian D. Woodruff

        Interesting thought Margaret. Line breaks in poetry can allow the reader to catch his breath, psychologically speaking, while creating or underlining formal divisions or accompanying changes in focus (e.g., Hero to Leander). Have you read enough modern poetry (free verse and otherwise) to sense that the same strategy is in effect; and how it might relate to other lithographic arrangements that abound today?
        I also like to think of your comment in relation to the work (mostly collections of short poems by Stefan George, whose use of empty lines and blank pages often seems dictatorial: now dear reader, you will (please) breathe.

  8. Brian A. Yapko

    Julian, I have so much to say on this interesting subject and am handicapped trying to peck words out on my.phone (I’m away in Florida looking for a new home.) Since my ability to write is shortened, let me broefly say this. All the commenters are right — in particular about technology. But there’s more to it: Up to the 19th Century, entertainment was difficult to find. No TV, no cinema. Poetry and music played a different role then… they shouldered the burden of what to do on a boring, gaslit night. People had salons where.poetry was read and music.played. People read poetry by candlelight and has hours to kill. Music and.poetry NEEDED to be longer. The more words, the longer the opera, the better. I would love to talk about interminable Russian novels which occupied snowy, lonely evenings. Or how Byron and the Shelleys filled long Swiss evenings spinning Gothic horror
    tales (leading to Frankenstein) because there was nothing else to do. Long poetry.filled a practical need that is less compelling in a world where we are inundated by entertainment options. I have much more to say on this subject but will wait till I can do so from my computer. Oh, the irony!

    One last thing: if something is long and boring, people won’t enjoy it. They have too many other options for entertainment. If it’s long but really involving, people may still give it a go. In my.mind I’m contrasting Mahler (who is not exactly exciting) with Beethoven’s 9th which, though very long for a symphony, will always fill a theater.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      thanks for battling with your phone, Brian. Having recently lost 2 such myself (to the detriment, or benefit, or readers here) I can sympathize.
      Outside the realm of music, I am no historian, so I am ignorant in saying but, while I don’t doubt that Byron, the Shelleys, and others like them whiled away many hours spinning yarns or composing poetry, surely there were large numbers of people who, though they could read, did not have the luxury of that kind of free time. Come to that, we read of cases (Mendelssohn is often cited) of an artist’s wearing himself out & dying prematurely.
      Maybe I need to consider that those of earlier periods in history (even including the early Californians I mention elsewhere in this thread) who entertained themselves with music, literature and the visual arts did so through the support of hired hands–an economy that applies to fewer of us today.
      Long and boring is never good, but it’s good that some risk it–Beethoven in the 9th, for instance. Wagner (of whom DF Tovey said something to the effect of “when you see the tip of Wotan’s spear, you can count on half an hour of sheer boredom,” Mahler, and others do have their champions, too. Who’s a figure livelier than Leonard Bernstein?–and he recorded 2 complete cycles of Mahler’s symphonies.

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brian, your mention of various nineteenth-century novels is really the elephant in the room here. A major reason for the decline in popularity of the lengthy poem was the rise of the prose novel, starting in the early 1700s and fully blooming in the next century. Narrative poems that told their stories in hundreds or thousands of lines simply gave way to narratives that were written in straightforward discourse, without the addition of figurative language, metrical measures, or outdated terminology.

      As a result, poetry drifted towards the shorter forms like the lyric, or to free verse. As more and more persons entered school and learned only the rudiments of literacy, a market developed for simpler printed communication, which produced the explosion of popular magazines and newspapers, short stories, and a variety of novels in many styles, touching on contemporary subjects. You didn’t need to tell stories in verse anymore, and you certainly couldn’t sell them.

      The poets who represented modernism’s new approach were in some cases disturbed by this change. Ezra Pound attempted a long poem with his “Cantos,” and W.C. Williams with his “Paterson.” Free-verse attempts to be lengthy were sometimes called “sequences” by critics — a term that tried to straddle the divide between long narrative and modernist reduced imagery. These sequences never really cohered, and remained long poems made up of disparate chunks that barely made sense. They had no real audience outside of academia.

      Did modern attention spans shrink? Yes, of course. But another factor is that poetry, under the pressure of the developments described above, generally became what is called a “boutique” art. This means that it remained in the hands of a small elite of trained people who kept its older traditions alive and active, sort of like cameo-carving, Belgian lace-making, or the hand engraving of firearms that Beretta in Italy still does.

      Reply
  9. Paddy Raghunathan

    Julian,

    I am amazed that what I perceived to be a harmless comment would result in such a passionate essay. Before I add more comments to this immensely engaging thread, let me reiterate that I enjoyed reading ‘Jeweler’s Deposition’ very much, and long though it was, I zipped through it before I knew it. My main point was hopefully not missed: as long as longish poems are written and read well, they don’t seem long at all.

    While there are several forms of media to distract us in this day and age (as most other commenters have noted), there is also something called work. Most of us have day jobs. A shorter poem is, therefore, much easier to read and comment on. It’s as simple as that. I wish I had all day to spare, and I’m certain if that were the case, I wouldn’t complain about the length of any poem at all, be it written in free verse, blank verse or in perfect meter and rhyme.

    Believe me, I am as chagrined about having to get to work, and not having the time for a longish poem as you are with my complaining about my lack of time. 😉

    Best regards,

    Paddy

    Reply
  10. Paddy Raghunathan

    I also want to add, the great Millay (whether she was “woke” or not can be debated, but no one will doubt her greatness as a poet 🙂 ) was inspired to write sonnets after she read a sonnet by Wordsworth.

    She had herself written and published several long poems, as had the great Wordsworth himself, but the sonnet, according to her, forced the poet to find a closure in fourteen lines.

    Of course, the Japanese want to keep it even shorter, which is why they write Haiku.

    Best regards,

    Paddy

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Thanks for both these posts, Paddy. You’re certainly right about work: see my reply to Brian Yapko, above. Especially if one is as slow and frankly inefficient as I often was. So maybe behind my hope for a broader and more receptive literary culture is the wish for a society in which less work is required. It seems always to be promised, and never to materialize.

      Reply
  11. Paul A. Freeman

    As a fan of short stories, narrative poems generally hold my attention – long bouts of navel-gazing don’t.

    I’ll see if I can fish out one of my ‘Lost’ Canterbury Tales.

    As mentioned, I, also, believe there are too many screen distractions these days. I personally find that a small screen that doesn’t easily show line length and formatting of a poem puts me off until I can get to my laptop.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Do give us one of your retrieved Canterbury Tales, Paul.
      You’re right about small screens, but (to parody Michael Flanders, of Flanders and Swann): but my desktop’s in the basement / and I like the sunlight more.

      Reply
  12. James Sale

    There is loads of great commentary and insights here, but the short answer is yes – however corrupted our society becomes. Writing a perfect short poem is difficult enough, requires immense skill, labour and the Muse too. Writing a long poem is an altogether different sort of enterprise, and altogether more difficult – which is why we have so few comparatively – because its success, or otherwise, depends on more than technical ability.
    If we think about the most famous long poem in Modernism that actually is a poem, The Wasteland, that’s about as long a poem as anyone can stomach in that modernist genre. But in real terms, it’s not very long compared, say, to Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy. Why is that, what does it not have? And the answer is surprisingly simple: it is not a narrative. It is not a story – it is just, as it says itself, ‘fragments’ thrown up and we make sense of them.
    But narrative, as Professor Cox once wrote, may be regarded as a primary act of mind. Thus, to pick up ABB’s point about Legacy, it is a true story, and it’s well written, so we can proceed with it. We all want stories, compelling stories, stories that soar, that amuse, that emotionally grip us. And that is the challenge for the long poem writer: sustaining the interest over long periods.
    Something from my own experience may be of interest to others here, since most of you know that I am writing a very long poem called The English Cantos. Part 1, HellWard has appeared, as has part 2, StairWell. I am currently 25% of the way into completing part 3, the final part, DoorWay, or my Paradiso. For all my mythological and Biblical knowledge, my technical ability to write in terza rima, there is something else about the writing that troubles me all the time and which I cannot shake-off; and I think no other poet should shake it off. What is that?
    Well, recently, I completed Canto 3. I was happy with it, very happy, BUT – key question – did it excite, was it compelling, was it as good as the best of StairWell? How could I know – it was my baby! So, I did what I’ve done from the beginning with the project: I sent it out to two people whose judgement I totally trust and asked them: does this make you want to keep reading (notice: not is this technically great, or is this thematically relevant)? At the point at which the answer is no, I’d have to stop writing, or re-write, or do something else, since in a long poem there is little point in writing something with no narrative thrust. Narrative, then, is the key to the long poem and especially to the epic; no real story, then it’s not really worth starting.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      You’re right about the story, Mr. Sale. It can provide the thread of coherence needed in a long poem. I’m uncertain how far a poet can wander into highways and byways in a longer poem these days, though, and isn’t that a traditional characteristic of epics and other long, narrative poetry? Doing so today might be to risk the work’s being considered flawed, but maybe the poet just has to say, “What do I care?”
      On your seeking critical affirmation, you’re right, of course, but there’s a risk: it’s much easier for a poet one knows & respects to tell you, “Sorry, that’s a lousy sonnet,” than for them to say, “That’s a lousy epic” (or canto).

      Reply
      • James Sale

        Thanks Julian but you misunderstand me: I am not seeking critical affirmation, not, not at all – that’s far too nebulous and disputatious a concept to be easily decided (though we all decide such things all the time). No, what I am looking for is much more visceral: does the narrative ‘grip’? One of the best comments made on HellWard was an English reader on Amazon who commented that he didn’t particularly read a lot but he did read Jack Reacher novels and this poem, HellWard, gripped him in that way. Really, such a weird thing to say, but that is what I want: to write so that once someone enters the domain, they have to finish reading it. Whether it is any ‘good’, then becomes a secondary issue: clearly, I am concerned about that, as we all should be, but if the poem is good, is great even, but really tedious to read, what is the point of it? People wanted to read Dante, and they wanted to watch Shakespeare; and so our poems need to be wanted in that way!

  13. Paul Martin Freeman

    From an artistic point of view, there’s something odd about stipulating poem length, just as there is about the idea of a poetry lover being put off by the length of a poem.

    Poetry comes in a multitude of shapes and sizes, and the only criterion worthy of consideration common to all is quality. And to––if the enduring popularity of Shakespeare is anything to go by––a normal sensibility, quality is instantly recognisable. Does the poem hold your attention? Because if it doesn’t, no matter how short it is, it’s not worth reading and you’re wasting your time.

    I can’t recall the number of occasions I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of a haiku, when those final 5 syllables seemed an eternity in Purgatory away as I sank into bored somnolence somewhere between the third and fourth ones; or else, like Satan and his rebel crew tumbling out of Heaven––or in this case, Hell––my eyes fell off the page after the fifth!

    Similarly with long poems. If the writer has done their job properly, then the reader will be caught up in the poem and time will flash by as they read it.

    And is this not the point of poetry, to whisk us out of our normal tedious world of minutes and hours into another more delightful one outside such constraints?

    Long and short, from an artistic point of view, have nothing to do with length. And neither should we.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      You’ve hit on something, Paul. Western poetic forms are all built on repetition, of rhythmic patterns and line endings (rhyme). Haiku, and I suppose many other forms relate to length and comparative length (e.g., 5-7-5). I’ve actually read very little haiku, but have wondered about the relative suitability of one language or another to its strictures. I think about the different paces at which information is presented in English, French, Latin etc. and how skillful a poet must be to make a natural-sounding (or otherwise esthetically convincing) translation without doing violence to the form of the original, or else abandoning it altogether. It is a problem that would seem to arise less in long poetry.

      Reply
  14. Paddy Raghunathan

    I also want to add, like every Hindu, I am enamored by Valmiki’s Ramayana (The Story Of Rama) and Vyasa’s Mahabharata. To Hindus they have enormous religious significance.

    To non Hindus, they are also very significant, even if not in a religious sense. For the simple reason that with 24,000 verses in Sanskrit, the Ramayana is the second longest poem in the world. And with 100,000 verses in Sanskrit, the Mahabharata is the longest poem in the world.

    Every week I recite the Vishnusahasranama (the thousand names of Vishnu) which is a very small part of the Mahabharata. Even though I have memorized it, it takes me a good half hour to recite it. 🙂

    Everything we do boils down to how much importance we give it, and how much time we have.

    Best regards,

    Paddy

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Paddy, I have only read the Ramayana in a prose translation, but the long story held my attention for two reasons — first, because it was intrinsically interesting and exciting, and second, because I wanted to learn more about Hindu religion and mythology.

      This touches upon one of your main points — it is not so much length that matters, as literary quality (that is, if the poet has done his fictive mimesis well), and whether the subject is a compelling one for the reader.

      Browning’s dramatic monologues are great because even the very long ones deal with interesting characters and situations. This is true for the book-length poems of Frederick Turner and Arthur Mortensen today.

      And yes — there is nothing more soporific than bad haiku.

      Reply
      • Paul Martin Freeman

        Hello Joe. I think that’s me you’re responding to. But if Paddy wants to respond on my behalf, he’s very welcome!

      • Paddy Raghunathan

        Indeed not much to disagree with Joseph on this score, even if he was replying to both of us simultaneously.

        Frankly, even poems that put me to sleep are welcome, compared to so many poems that don’t make any sense at all. Judson Jerome, in his book A Handbook for Poets pointed to verse by Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

        And although I don’t want to mention any names of journals, some of them very reputed, I haven’t been able to make any sense of 80 to 90 percent of the poems they publish.

        And going by Joseph’s well-known essay, I am not alone in my lament.

        Best regards,

        Paddy

      • Julian D. Woodruff

        Joseph, I’m not quite sure how to separate “fictive mimesis” from the compelling subject, other than that a compelling subject might be treated badly. I’m thinking about narrative balance. For instance, in my narrative “The Last Detail,” published here a while back, I think my comic narrative overwhelmed my point about today’s knee-jerk incivility and vulgarity (which I was obediently trying to “show” rather than “tell about” or comment on).

  15. James A Tweedie

    Great discussion with many good points and insights admixed with opinions and personal experiences.

    I appreciated Margaret’s reference to Longfellow’s Evangeline and would add mention of his equally-epic and equally-blank verse Song of Hiawatha and Courtship of Miles Standish. There are also, of course, his longer, rhyming poems such as Tales of a Wayside Inn and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.. Given that Longfellow presided over Harvard’s Modern Language program for 18 years (until 1854, suggests that lengthy poetry was still standard fare and extremely popular through most of the 19th century.

    Joe mentions The Waste Land as an example of a longer 20th century free verse effort to which I would add Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral as a self-conscious effort to bring a semblance of dramatic verse back into the realm of the theater. If one questions whether this verse is poetry or not, I would suggest contrasting his verse with the insipid prose of the murderous Knights, written to sound as pathetic and self-serving as possible. The distinction is clear. Whether the poetry is good, or not, is a different question.

    I find Longfellow’s choice of meter in Evangeline and Hiawatha (the latter based on a trochaic Finnish epic), to be soporific on an extended reading while Dante’s terza rima (and as recreated by Sales) to be far more compelling, as I also find true with Homer’s (and Virgil’s) dactylic hexameters and the Song of Roland’s “decasyllabics” (a precursor to pentameter and adapted by Chaucer in a more refined and rhyming form in his Canterbury Tales).

    I suspect that I am not the only late 20th century reader who got turned off to epic, long poems by reading Longfellow.

    Reply
    • James A Tweedie

      I might also add that I breezed through all three of Dante’s epics (although Paradiso required more effort) but never finished Milton’s Paradise Lost as seeming to be more of an effort than an inspiration. The 1200+ words of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, on the other hand, flew by quickly and prompted a second reading.

      Reply
      • Paddy Raghunathan

        Indeed not much to disagree with Joseph on this score, even if he was replying to both of us simultaneously.

        Frankly, even poems that put me to sleep are welcome, compared to so many poems that don’t make any sense at all. Judson Jerome, in his book A Handbook for Poets pointed to verse by Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

        And although I don’t want to mention any names of journals, some of them very reputed, I haven’t been able to make any sense of 80 to 90 percent of the poems they publish.

        And going by Joseph’s well-known essay, I am not alone in my lament.

        Best regards,

        Paddy

      • Paddy Raghunathan

        Sorry, James, I replied to the wrong subthread.

        Best regards,

        Paddy

      • Julian D. Woodruff

        Perhaps my patience with Milton is ill-placed, Mr. Tweedie. Is Milton, in your view, a boring epic writer, or altogether a boring poet?

    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Mr. Tweedie,
      I had the same reaction to Hiawatha when I tried it. I was unaware that it had its origins in a Finnish poem–some linguist Longfellow must have been! Hiawatha’s trochees & feminine endings cloy, somehow. (I was unable to recreate Groth’s feminine endings when I translated his “Regenlied” here a couple of years ago, and had to scramble to find some parallel. Those line endings seem so characteristic of German and somehow so foreign to English.)

      Reply
      • James A Tweedie

        Julian,

        To respond to your question about Milton.

        In reading Paradise Lost I get the feeling that somewhere along the line Milton lost his muse, or whatever you want to call it, and finished the work through sheer grit, drawing from his considerable skill and craft along the way.

        I rank Milton among the greatest of English poets and, despite my personal lack of enthusiasm for his epic work, I do so in part BECAUSE of Paradise Lost and the inspiration and example it has offered to those who followed after him, including thos of us who seek to attain to even some small measure of his genius.

  16. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    I have a great deal to read and catch up on. I look forward to it. I would, however, like to reply without the influence of other points of view. I may come back after reading all of them:

    For me, for the most part, poetry represents beauty and brevity. Poetry provides me with a quick fix of the literary… a bite-size piece of linguistic magic to fire my senses and spice my life. I want it in one quick hit (not a series), and I’m addicted to it. I’ll come back for more as often as I crave it, and that’s often.

    I’m also an avid reader of literature and always have a book or three on the go. Novels demand my full attention and longer periods of time… which is why it’s great to slip a poem into my busy schedule – a rich and luscious snack to lift the spirits and stave off hunger before indulging in my evening meal with Thomas Hardy on the menu.

    This doesn’t mean I have a short attention span. It just means I prefer to read short poems. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy epic poems. I’ve studied and reveled in many, and James Sale has kindly introduced me to his wonderful works – thoroughly recommended. I do, however, have a preference and that is for short poems… unless one can persuade me convincingly with something that will turn my head and get me to put down my latest novel.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Susan,
      I appreciate your point of view, and it’s good to have a contrasting opinion from a regular contributor to the site. The shorter sort of poetry you prefer, I think, is especially appropriate to the astonishing verbal pyrotechnics your work here & elsewhere features. Do you agree?

      Reply
      • Susan Jarvis Bryant

        Julian, firstly thank you for this interesting essay, but most of all for replying to all the interesting observations. This entire comments thread has made for excellent reading, and I have learned much.

        Although my preference is for short poetry, that doesn’t mean poetry in the same vein as my own. I am particularly fond of subtle beauty – beauty invested in subjects I don’t often deal in myself. Peter Hartley (for instance) has written some magnificent pieces on grief in an exquisite style I can only aspire to. I like an array of subjects in varying forms with one thing in common… the quality of the writing.

        I have a personal rule when watching films… if I’m not grabbed by the characters and the plot in 20 minutes, I won’t waste another hour and a half watching… life is too short. Having read many epic poems and studied Byron’s Don Juan (far too closely for my own good), I apply the same rule to long poems… if I’m not grabbed after one hundred lines… that’s it.

        So, I’m not opposed to long poems… I just need them to grab me initially… if they don’t, I’ll move on. This has nothing to do with attention span… it has everything to do with knowing what I like. I’ll spend hours on something that caters to my needs. Poems (like all art) should (above all else) be entertaining. I am leaving this discussion with an open mind…

  17. Margaret Coats

    Julian, this is clearly a topic of much interest, but with all the discussion of distractions, and the fragile hope that literary quality can overcome them, we have mostly instanced past works that do–and are now less read than in the past.

    You asked about what is now being done. Here’s a brief summary of what I know, mostly from what has appeared at SCP, though I visit other poetry and translation sites.

    Epic ambition is in the air. James Sale has an imitation of Dante in process, of which we have seen long samples. The Commedia is not an epic according to some definitions, but I agree that it is epic in scope and sublimity of the topic, and James’s work has these features. James has reviewed three other epics here–by Frederick Glaysher, Frederick Turner, and Joseph Sale. Andrew Benson Brown has shown us a number of portions from his Legends of Liberty. I reviewed Amanda Hall’s epic in sonnets. We have seen six samples of Stephen Binns’s translation of Dante.

    Paul Martin Freeman’s bus poems seem to be a collection of narratives rather than a single work, though he may have some frame to the whole that we haven’t seen. In either case, one of them, “The Outing” is quite an extensive story poem. Joseph Salemi’s “Gallery of Ethopaths” is probably a coordinated collection of satiric pieces. From Joe’s reference to the number of lines in the whole, he seems to consider the Gallery more than the sum of its parts.

    Lyric sequences (with long traditions in both West and East) must be out there, but the few I know appear only in book form, sometimes with samples on poetry sites. Joseph Charles MacKenzie is the only contemporary poet I know with two sequences published. He did argue that his first one, “Sonnets for Christ the King,” appropriately included love sonnets to his wife, because the marriage of Christ to the Church is thematically significant. Thus it is a single long work, although each sonnet can be appreciated separately. Such is the essence of a traditional sequence, even when a few individual poems constitute a meaningful small group. I’m not talking about modernist practice of “sequences,” to which Joseph Salemi refers above.

    Some of our dramatic monologues are long poems, but the only verse play I remember is Evan Mantyk’s incomplete “Stop the Steal.”

    Outside SCP, poets who have lengthy works to present tend to leave commercial poetry sites and set up their own domain. This makes them more difficult to track. Long English translations of classic poems are a little easier to find, because they may be sponsored by or linked by organizations promoting the culture from which the translated work comes.

    Therefore, Julian, in answer to your question about variety in authors, genres, and styles of long poems, it can be found. We can also find the pitfalls of each type. James Sale has said quite a bit in his reviews about the lack of an epic hero or epic style in purported epics. Andrew Benson Brown has bemoaned the absence of traditional heroic verse. Amanda Hall explains her wish to perfect iambic pentameter by using exactly 10 syllables per line, while I found her practice to produce deficient English usage. It is rhymed, so Roy Peterson might check it out and see if rhymes make up for what is lost.

    Long poems are being written and planned. They do not work for many readers because of legitimate constraints in time and interest. And poets have their challenges to overcome, which range far beyond imagining an exciting story.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Thank you, Margaret, for your excellent quick survey of what this community, at least, has produced and is currently working on. Your critical remark points to a concern I raise below in commenting on Mr. Tweedie’s “Magic Lamp” poem.

      Reply
    • Paul Martin Freeman

      Hello Margaret

      Thank you for referring to the story-poems from my book. The Bus Poems: A Tale of the Devil is a collection of tales embedded in a collection of whimsical portraits, each poem relating to a London bus route. The stories are largely told in episodes during the course of the work making them unsuitable for publication here. But some of them are complete in one poem and these are the ones Evan has been publishing.

      In the other stories, the main characters are likely to appear as minor ones in other tales. The principal story of the book, taking up the last quarter, concerns the visit to contemporary London of the Devil. The Devil’s tale, while bringing Paradise Lost up to date and, within the context of the biblical story, accounting for the enduring nature of Jew-hatred, is an attempt to make sense of the mystic’s world through common human experiences of love, empathy and destiny, as well as such things as life review and near death experiences.

      As I explained in the comments, the Devil’s tale, of which The Outing is a final faint echo, is a re-telling of the Christ story with a nondescript woman as heroine.

      Thank you for affording me the opportunity to explain. Once again, you help me with my work.

      Reply
  18. James A Tweedie

    I’ve never counted to see how long my own poems are. Having just done so, my guess is that my longest SCP-posted poem to date is 122 lines of terza rima in “The Magic Lamp of Al-Jafar.” I’d be interested to know if readers fall asleep before they’re half-way through!

    https://classicalpoets.org/2020/02/04/the-magic-lamp-of-al-jafar-a-terza-rima-by-james-a-tweedie/

    I would also be interested to know if Evan recalls the longest poem posted on SCP as one post?

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      I’m going at yesterday’s posts here from the bottom up–without a lot of repetition, I hope.
      “The Magic Lamp of Al Jafar” is a splendid piece of work, Mr. Tweedie. And it may be an indication of the problem that I failed to comment at the time (i.e., time to read and think about, but with this & that in addition, maybe not time to comment. In any case, my apologies.
      To me, it has virtues that a longer poem of merit is likely to have: an intriguing, thought-provoking story, a clear narrative presentation, and very adroit handling of the poetic line, with lots of variety in cadence (or should I say line closure?). Your comparison of the lamp’s song to “a mighty stream” and its tranquil flow to a “wistful, whispered” end reminds me of Schubert’s superb song with obbligato horn, “Auf dem Strom.” If you don’t know it, give a listen and see if you agree.

      Reply
      • James A Tweedie

        Julian, Thank you for taking a look at my Al-Jafar poem and for offering such a thoughtful comment in reply. As for the form and style of the djinn’s song it may well have been akin to Schubert’s “Auf dem Strom” though, to my own mind’s ear, it may have come closer to the Turkish lullaby, “Dandini” as in this recording by Azam Ali.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5W3Ay2O2zA

  19. Joseph S. Salemi

    I’ve been ruminating over this thread and its subject for two days now, and all sorts of thoughts have come to mind. One was about the Expansive Poetry Movement that flourished some 25 or 30 years ago. This was an offshoot of the larger “New Formalism” represented by the writers of the book “Rebel Angels,” by the magazines “Measure” and “The Formalist” (the latter edited by William Baer), and by smaller publications run by Terry Ponick, Bill Carlson, and Gerald Harnett.

    I was familiar with all of these publications and many of the persons involved therein, and I noticed a tendency (more marked in some places than in others) to want poetry to return to story-telling, which of course often demanded the use of the longer narrative form. This idea was at the heart of Expansive Poetry, and I always gritted my teeth in impatience when this sentence was repeated by many of its proponents:

    “I have a great story to tell, and it is so good that it will practically write itself!”

    This idea lay behind the formation of Story Line Press, which was started precisely to allow poets to “tell great stories” in a coherent and intelligible manner. And you had all of these poets (who should have known better) going on and on about what a wonderful and powerful story they had, and how they were sure it would be successful simply on its own merits as a tale.

    This tendency got under my skin, and bothered me incessantly. I was happy to support and work with the Expansive Poetry movement, but I knew damned well the NO STORY TELLS ITSELF, and that the quality of any literary work was not based solely on its subject matter, no matter how intrinsically interesting. No poem survives if the primary concern of the poet is not with language!

    Many of the Expansive Poetry partisans suffered from the misconception that a great story is always great, and bound to be appealing. But everyone knows very well that even a good tale is frequently spoiled by an incompetent or over-enthusiastic teller. How many forgetful grandfathers or garrulous uncles have spoiled a family history by relating it in a slovenly and careless manner? How many excellent jokes are ruined by idiots who have no sense of timing, or a poor command of diction?

    And this is why I always maintain that the primary concern of a poet should be fictive mimesis, and not subject matter — even though it is wise of him to choose subject matter that is intriguing and exciting. Sometimes the poet’s subject matter can be something that actually happened, but more likely it will be the product of the poet’s imagination, incidental memories, and fantasy, or what Aristotle called “invention” — i.e. the “finding” of stuff to work with.

    When fictive mimesis operates hand in glove with expert command of language and rhetoric, great poetry may happen. And the length of the poem will not matter. But sustaining fictive mimesis over the long stretch of a narrative poem will indeed be difficult — and as someone said, “Even Homer nods at times.”

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Maybe this will turn out to be the final post in this thread, Joseph, and a fitting one it would be. I hope that you will take the trouble when the opportunity arises on this site to point out good examples of fictive mimesis. In any case, I think you’re right: a skilled writer can sometimes make a blah story more interesting than a great story in the hands of a poor narrator.

      Reply
  20. James Sale

    Hi Julian, Not sure that Joe’s comment can be the final comment on the thread. On the surface, it would appear that I disagree with Joe on the topic of the narrative, but actually I totally agree with him, and I totally endorse the idea of fictive mimesis which I strive for myself. In the example of Lee Childs/Jack Reacher that I cite above, I omit to say – for brevity’s sake – that although I would not consider Childs’ books higher literature, there is one hell of a craftsmanship going into them! Very, very skilled indeed to get that level of honing of the work into its essential state. The reality is, to write well in any genre, requires all three components operating simultaneously: Muse, theme, technique; but for the purposes of any one us improving our work – or for the purposes of critical analysis – we may hunker down on just one element. But continued focus on only one element leads to anomalies and disappointments as Joe’s account of the Expansive Poetry movement shows.

    Reply
    • Julian D. Woodruff

      Oh boy, James. Your comment provides grist that might keep this thread going for another 20 or more posts. First, I want to say that I deeply appreciate that you guys who are in the midst of really big projects are concerned enough with this discussion to post once or multiple times. Second, let me apologize for mistaking your point above. In doing so, I get to my present concern, which is critical vocabulary and clarity. I’m guessing I’m simply not steeped in the terminology with which you, Mr. Salemi, and Mr. Brown are confident and comfortable–which is why I asked Mr. Salemi to offer specific comments relating to “fictive mimesis” when a post to this website offers the occasion for such a response. On “Muse,” I’m not sure whether you mean sheer inspiration (itself a word less than perfectly clear, I know), such as might give rise to, say for example, “Shall I compare thee …,” or a guide who might prevent untoward narrative digressions, or both, or more, or something else again. (I think of the introduction to Mozart’s Prague Symphony, where one might think of the Muse in at least the two roles I’ve listed above.) To me, “technique” also must be pinned down firmly: rhyme, rhyming strategy, rhythm, consistency of tone and thematic focus … technique can mean any of these and many more things, can’t it? So that more specific terms can help keep a discussion on terra firma.
      “Theme” seems a bit more defined to me, but my own idea might still be off from yours. Assuming not, though, this is where your “grip” would come in. You can pick a gripping theme (crime fighting, maybe, is dependable) and give it a blah treatment or a gripping one. But then we’re onto taste (writer’s and reader’s both): you get (or used to get, I should say) Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet in 2ndary school primarily, I’d say, because they were thought gripping stories to and for the students, only 2ndarily because it was desired that students be exposed to gripping treatments of the stories. The Haunting of Hill House is the paragon of treatments in its niche, but only mmmm to me.
      I hope you and others are up for continuing to post to this thread, as I’ve probably made some very arguable points and omitted important others; but I understand if everyone has decided at this point that there’s more to life.

      Reply
      • James Sale

        Julian, it’s unfortunate that we use jargon, but every profession and activity does – whether you are cooking, gardening, plumbing or anything: we end up with a specialised vocabulary and that can be very helpful for practitioners if not the wider public. Regarding specifying what I mean by those 3 areas, the best thing I can do is to refer you to a major article for The Epoch Times I did some while ago that unpicks the 3 elements: https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-making-of-a-poem-courage-strength-and-kung-fu_3145658.html

        And regarding the fictive mimesis terms itself, it’s rather like the NLP (Near-Linguistic-Programming) observation that the ‘map is not the territory’. People are always getting confused into thinking a ‘map’ – and words are maps – is actually the ‘thing’ itself rather than a pointer towards that ‘thing.’

        To make this specific and less philosophical, take The Divine Comedy. It is a sublime example of fictive mimesis, BUT just how many people mistake Dante (the Pilgrim) in the poem for Dante the person, indeed, Dante the poet who writes the poem? Dante the Pilgrim is, frankly, a complete idiot more or less: he misunderstands, misreads, most of what he encounters, and is only saved by the advice of Virgil and others – right into heaven itself! But we constantly want to mistake this Pilgrim for Dante – but the poet creates a fiction around Dante. One of the profoundest comments ever made on the DC by Professor Singleton was: ‘the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not a fiction’. Take that on board and you begin to see the power of the writing, the truth of what Joe is arguing for, and why we have to be clear about this issue – and not mistake poetry for reality. Equally, we need to be clear that poetry is not solipsistic (a la Deconstructionism), and that it does point to realities. Dante and Shakespeare do this at a level that is simply astonishing.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Yes, a lot of people mistake the speaker of a poem for the poet, even though this mistake is never made with prose fiction. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had this happen with my own poems. For example, I wrote my poem “The No-Life Algorithm” based on a letter to the editor of a Catholic magazine, writing in the voice of its writer. Someone thought it was a true story and wished a happy Thanksgiving to me, my wife, and “our” seven children named in the poem… but in reality, I’m not even married, and the seven names were chosen for the rhyme and meter.

  21. Joseph S. Salemi

    I won’t point out specific examples of fictive mimesis in poems published here at the SCP, for two good reasons. First, fictive mimesis doesn’t just happen in individual lines of verse, but is usually spread widely in a text. You can’t just focus on fictive mimesis in the way that you can single out a good simile or metaphor, or comment on someone’s alliteration. Second, I almost always mention and discuss poems posted here at the SCP when I like them or when I find them especially interesting, and that by itself is commentary enough.

    “Mimesis” just means “imitation, copying, representation, image-making.” And “fictive” just means “made up, imagined, fantasized.” When critics speak of “fictive mimesis” they mean an artist’s ability to represent the world and the people around him, but NOT from actual models or living persons. Instead, he creates a world of hyper-reality, conjured up from memory, impressions,beliefs, conventions, opinions, personal preferences, stereotypes, stylistic patterns, and rhetorical devices. He might even use some real experiences of his own, but solely as malleable materials that can be rearranged in whatever manner he sees best. And when he is done, he has a literary artifact.

    Fictive mimesis is actually quite simple. But I can tell you from long experience that getting young students to understand it and accept it is a Herculean task. They all seem born enslaved to the three miseries of meaning, message, and moral. And what is really scary today is that many of them are actually offended if something they read in a fictional work is “not true” or “not proper.” I kid you not.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      It sounds from what you’re saying as if fictive mimesis is simply the quality of a good poem forming a panoramic picture in the reader’s mind with the words as a foundation, a sort of self-contained world around the words, extending only as far as the person standing in the middle can see as he pictures the scene, and he’s simply carried along the words as if by a river, seeing through the speaker’s eyes. The folk songs I listened to growing up had that quality, as do the poems of all my favorite poets, and I try to duplicate it in my own poems.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Yes, I suppose one could describe it that way. For me, the most important thing in a poem is EFFECT — the intense reaction that it provokes in the reader. By creating (via fictive mimesis) an imagined scenario or situation or characters or vignette, you make it possible for him to have this intense reaction. But you won’t do it if your primary concern is meaning and message and moral.

        There’s an old saying — “ut pictura, poesis.” It means “As with painting, so with poetry.” The idea is that just like someone viewing a good painting will be swept up in its colors and beauty and verisimilitude, so also will the reader of a good poem be swept up by its words and linguistic figures to a new imaginative world.

  22. Julian D. Woodruff

    Ah, so so so! (to quote Stockhausen). For me that disperses a good bit of cloud. Thanks, Joseph.
    Your comment at the end puts me in mind of Isak Dinesen’s “The Immortal Story” and the movie by Orson Welles that’s based on it. The notion that a fiction is intolerable …

    Reply
  23. Phillip Whidden

    Wrecknology

    When practicality as focus of
    Our education trounces fictive things
    Like symphonies, we just may turn to love
    Of poetry and painting, what has wings
    That lift the human higher than the moon?
    Since Kitty Hawk and railways rammed by steam,
    Since gas raised up the first hot-air balloon,
    Technologies alone have reigned supreme
    Above the arts. Do not forget that long
    Before the arrowhead was chipped from stone,
    We loved our chanting and our love of song.
    Our birthright is the arts. It needs its throne.
    When AI and computers do their worst,
    The people will respond with rhymes that burst . . . them.

    Reply

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