The Dilemma of the Long Poem

American poetry prides itself on its great scope and diversity, but one wonders if an outsider might not come away with a very different notion. Imagine what an intelligent eighteenth-century reader would conclude if he surveyed the several hundred books of poetry published in America this past year. (For simplicity’s sake, let us keep this long-suffering gentleman’s conclusions descriptive rather than evaluative. There is no way of knowing what if anything he would actually enjoy amid this poetic avalanche.) His overall reaction, I suspect, would be a deep disappointment over the predictable sameness, the conspicuous lack of diversity in what he read. Where are the narrative poems, he would ask, the verse romances, ballads, hymns, verse dramas, didactic tracts, burlesques, satires, the songs actually meant to be sung, and even the pastoral eclogues? Are stories no longer told in poetry? Important ideas no longer discussed at length? The panoply of available genres would seem reduced to a few hardy perennials which poets worked over and over again with dreary regularity—the short lyric, the ode, the familiar verse epistle, perhaps the epigram, and one new-fangled form called the “sequence” which often seemed to be either just a group of short lyrics stuck together or an ode in the process of falling apart. Amid this myriad of shorter work he would see only a few poems longer than six or seven pages—most of them massive and complex undertakings running many times the length of the average thin volume. These, he would ascertain, are the epics of this age, but he would probably not be able to classify them further since they are mostly difficult, allusive works not governed by a narrative or expository structure. They undoubtedly belong to a genre whose rules he doesn’t understand.

This hypothetical gentleman would also be perplexed by the paucity of technical means he saw employed. Most of what he read would be in free verse (some of which he would recognize as such from his familiarity with Milton, Smart, and, of course, the Old Testament) balanced by a little irregular pentameter, an occasional sestina, and virtually nothing else. What happened to rhyme, he would ask, and all the meters ancient and modern plus all the familiar stanza forms of English? These new poets, he might conclude, are a very monotonous bunch indeed who can only manage the shorter forms and even those only within the slenderest range of technical means. Poems longer than half a dozen pages seem to be beyond their powers altogether. Yes, American poetry would seem to be a very limited enterprise. It not only lacks great poets of the stature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, it also lacks estimable lesser writers of scope and versatility, like Dyer, Thomson, Collins, Cowper, Young, Shenstone, or Gay.