… it is not just modern poetry, but poetry that is today obscure. ‘Paradise Lost’ is what it was; but the ordinary reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it — instead, he glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along with ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Faust,’ and Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson.’ But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice. It was not the Public, nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the universities have trained, who put together this list of the world’s dullest books.
…from Poetry and the Age, by Randall Jarrell, published in 1953, and discovered by me via Reddit.