News at Eleven: But the metrical sprawl

produces moments of real bathos; "a tragedy where I played a leading role myself" is far weaker than the equivalent lines in Surrey or Dryden, and the declining stars passage comes across as overwritten and too intent on provocative effect ("dank," "sweeping"). The last 60 years or so have not produced a verse rhetoric that will sustain a long poem, except as a series of jolting fits and starts, so jolting fits and starts are what we get.

from The Washington Post: The Founder of Rome

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