“Poetry differs from all the other arts in that no
considerable specimen of it is ever thoroughly good. A lyric may be perfect,
but nothing that is longer: in this Edgar Allan Poe was undoubtedly right. The
plays of Shakespeare, though they swarm with magnificent passages, also show a
great many spots of dullness and banality, and such a poem as Milton's ‘Lycidas’
is very far from being all poetry. In music there is a much higher incidence of
sustained merit— for example, the first movement of the Eroica symphony, that
of Schubert's quintette in C major, and that of Brahms's first sextette. To be
sure, these are not whole compositions, but they are at least as long as ‘Lycidas’
or any act of ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Macbeth.’”—American journalist-philologist (and
classical music lover) H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)
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