It is at once disturbing and revealing to find that contemporary attitudes toward the long poem still basically derive from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Poetic Principle,” published over 150 years ago. Poe wrote, we recall, “I hold that a long poem does not exist.” By maintaining poetry is only poetry when it “excites, by elevating the soul,” he helped set in motion a way of composing and judging poetry which is greatly beneficial to short lyric poetry but downgrades the two other major types, the narrative and the dramatic. As a result, the short lyric has come to seem synonymous with “poetry” itself. Today’s critics—whether practical or theoretical—seldom are comfortable in judging the qualities or lack of them in a poem which is “long.”
Poe felt that the poem’s “elevating excitement”—a quality at the heart of his aesthetic—”cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags—fails—a revulsion ensues—and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.” A long poem such as Paradise Lost, he maintained, should be regarded as poetical “only when, losing sight of that vital requisite in all works of art, unity, we view it merely as a series of minor poems.
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