There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? I do not mean “influence.” “Influence” is similar—akin to getting one’s genetic material passed down to a new generation—but, paradoxically, the survival of the “offspring” poem is proportional to its distinctness from the template. A too-faithful transmission of the father’s traits to the son is an adaptive disadvantage.
Consider, rather, the exact copies a virus makes of its DNA. Here, the measure of success is viral load, the number of exact copies of the virus the virus can disseminate. Physical copies would be one measure—print run, posts and re-posts, hits on a website, that sort of thing—but really, that is the equivalent of a dormant virus, the virus waiting to replicate itself inside the mind or on the tongue. Probably the truest success, from this perspective, is proportional to how many human beings, on any given day, feel compelled to recite these verses, even if the words don’t make that much sense anymore.
By this measure, the most successful poems in the English language are Shakespeare’s dramatic poems. Whole theater companies and innumerable actors across the English-speaking world are memorizing and reciting those lines. In the classical world, this distinction went to the narrative poems of Homer.
The most successful poem overall, though, would be—surprisingly enough—a long, didactic philosophical poem, in quatrains, in an almost-dead language: a Sanskrit poem called the Bhagavad-Gita. Hundreds of thousands of people recite this poem every day.
Now for a few reflections on the foregoing.
I refer, specifically, to verse; the Qur’an is in rhymed prose. If we were to categorize that book as a “prose poem,” it would probably be the most biologically successful poem, statistically.
I would like to point out the broad types of poem that have enjoyed this anomalous success. The one common factor seems to be the fact that these are non-lyric. In the Old Days, that is, before poets worldwide limited themselves (or were limited by their audiences: chicken or egg) to writing page-length lyric-ish poems, there used to be a very clear-cut hierarchy in the world of literature and poetry that put Epic and Dramatic above Lyric. (The Didactic genre never got much respect, perhaps because the classical pagan and Semitic religions never produced an equivalent of the Gita.) For over a century, poets, with a few notable exceptions, have blocked out the possibility of full-length dramatic or narrative poetry. They complain about marginalization sometimes but fail to examine what made culturally central poems culturally central: storytelling. Notice how general readers are more willing to attempt a 700 page novel than a seven line poem. This phenomenon has to do less with how much people hate poetry than how much they love stories. It may be that people just want the movement over time offered by narrative more than they do the lyrical expansion of the moment. Kinetic conflict is more popular than meditative stasis: This does not come as a surprise.
That old hierarchy with Lyric Poetry at the bottom has since been either obviated or inverted. This may be because we don’t write the other kinds anymore; no one declares their own pet form to be objectively weaker or at a cultural disadvantage. Poets accede their art’s marginalization, but they usually blame it on the audience/society, or on the “inaccessibility” of poetry produced and praised by certain practitioners of the art. Contemporary poets do not, from what I have seen, locate the root cause for the art’s marginalization in the art form itself. I should probably write “their variant of the art”—after all, what we, as a culture, consider “poetry” is actually a narrowed-down subgenre within the art, stripped of extended storytelling, didactic function, and stagecraft.
Another point: Religiosity is not necessary, but it does help. The most “successful” short poems in verse, when considered by this criterion of living recitation, are the texts and hymns recited at religious services. The Gita is not just a didactic poem in quatrains, excerpted from the narrative epic Mahabharata; the Gita holds a dual status as pure scripture. The 9th century C.E. Hindu theologian, Adi Sankara, classified it as the last of the Upanishads. Remember, though, that religiosity is not necessary. Shakespeare’s dramatic poems are soundly humanistic. It says a lot about the immensity of Shakespeare’s talent (and our own tendencies as a secular civilization) that his this-worldly dramatic poems are our most successful ones. He has gotten this far (pace Harold Bloom) without appealing to the species’ wacky religious side.
Length helps, too. There seems to be something about settling into a work of art, dwelling within it, having a Whole World contained or explained or presented in it, that unites the Gita and Shakespeare (and Homer back in the classical world, when Homeric reciters [Google the word rhapsode] traveled the Greek countryside the way itinerant Shakespeare troupes used to travel the English countryside—see Plato’s Ion). No matter how quotable a couplet by Alexander Pope is, no matter how powerful a Dickinson quatrain is, mass numbers of people just aren’t driven to recite it on a regular basis, or get up in a public place and recite it and get paid for doing so. (This is a curious thing. I know I wonder if I am losing a reader as soon as a poem spills onto page 2.) Short, quotable lines and catchphrases, mostly in our case from Shakespeare’s dramatic poems, live on and enter the language, yet their poetic nature becomes obscured; they are expressive shorthand, and do not qualify as recitation, which clears a space around itself. Length, historically, seems to offer its own survival advantage.
Luckily for us, the success of the virus is not the only kind of success. Some forms of life exist in near-toxic situations. They are small in number, you don’t hear about them, but they are well-nigh unkillable, no matter how hostile the environment gets. There are bacteria at the bottom of the sea, right by the mouths of underwater volcanoes, that see no sunlight; they eat sulfur and survive. It may be that lyric poetry, in its own way, as we write it today, is the form of poetry best adapted to survival, far hardier than dramatic or narrative poetry, which require conditions just so to flourish. The short lyric, after all, is the only kind of verse to have survived the civilization-wide ascendancy of prose.