It’s true: I try to be concise. Sometimes this has worked out well. For instance, a favorite professor once wrote on a paper of mine: “Short, sweet, to the point.” On the other hand, my current boss continually presses me to flesh out what he calls my “orphic utterances.”

Well, here’s what Marianne Moore had to say.

To a Snail

If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

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