/lit/ - Literature

If you look at the life achievement of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Tolstoy, which one seems most impressive, the most unlikely to be achieved by another human being?

A question for people who speak Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

Why do we use verses whose metrics are so limited? Even our larger verse, the decassyllabic one, that one used by Dante and Camões, is still very concise and allows little insertion of content.

Let's look at other poetic traditions:

Greek and Latin have the hexametres, verses that are considerably long.

The Frenchman used the decassyllabic verse, but eventually opted for the longer, more spacious, twelve-syllable Alexandrin verse.

English uses the ten-syllable iambic pentameter, but with the central question that a good part of the words in English is monosyllabic, and generally filling an English verse with ten syllables already allows the inclusion of enough content.

I wonder then: why do we who write in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian do not begin to use more verses of twelve syllables? Why does our tradition insist on verses of ten or even seven syllables?