09-12-2016, 09:05 AM
Also, a moment of insight: Sylvia Plath (yeah, Leanne, I love Plath -- but I really wish I had a copy of any of Ted Hughes' books, especially Tales from Ovid) once noted how she was jealous of the novelist, envying the fact that the novelist can take literally the entirety of a moment, the moment spanning up to a century, and the entirety precluding every single detail and every single action and every single word, and use it for her piece -- whereas, by corollary, the poet can only take "about a minute". But, if your mind isn't so limited to your earlier stated opinion that poetry is a self-indulgent exercise in cryptology (and really, a lot of the better translations of the epics read practically like novels -- or even skipping the translations like say The Ballad of the White Horse, or the Idylls of the King, which I in my perennial laziness have yet to read), then you're bound to have read at least one poem that shot through your heart in less than ten minutes -- unlike a novel, or a short story, which obviously have to be so long, or if they're not much longer than a poem, have to be so detailed, taking you through the logic of things rather than getting straight to the "aha!". And back to Plath: she envied the novelist not because she was a poet that disliked her medium (I think she disliked pretty much everything), but because the ideas she had at that moment were best encapsulated by the novel. Later, she made The Bell Jar. And even later, she made Ariel and Other Poems. Both are equally cherished.