Less is more. It’s a principle for good writing, not an unalterable law. And one of the best expositions of the principle was given by A.E. Housman in his lecture “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933):

Dryden’s translation [of The Canterbury Tales] shows Dryden in the maturity of his power and accomplishment, and much of it can be honestly and soberly admired. Nor was he insensible to all the peculiar excellence of Chaucer: he had the wit to keep unchanged such lines as ‘Up rose the sun and up rose Emily’ or ‘The slayer of himself yet saw I there’; he understood that neither he nor anyone else could better them. But much too often in a like case he would try to improve, because he thought that he could. He believed, as he says himself, that he was ‘turning some of the Canterbury Tales into our language, as it is now refined’; ‘the words’ he says again ‘are given up as a post not to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern art of fortifying’; ‘in some places’ he tells us ‘I have added somewhat of my own where I thought my author was deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true lustre, for want of words in the beginning of our language’.

Let us look at the consequences. Chaucer’s vivid and memorable line

The smiler with the knife under the cloke

becomes these three:

Next stood Hypocrisy, with holy leer,
Soft smiling and demurely looking down,
But hid the dagger underneath the gown.

Again:

Alas, quod he, that day that I was bore.

So Chaucer, for want of words in the beginning of our language. Dryden comes to his assistance and gives his thoughts their true lustre thus:

Cursed be the day when first I did appear;
Let it be blotted from the calendar,
Lest it pollute the month and poison all the year.

Or yet again:

The queen anon for very womanhead
Gan for to weep, and so did Emily
And all the ladies in the company.

If Homer or Dante had the same thing to say, would he wish to say it otherwise? But to Dryden Chaucer wanted the modern art of fortifying, which he thus applies:

He said; dumb sorrow seized the standers-by.
The queen, above the rest, by nature good
(The pattern formed of perfect womanhood)
For tender pity wept: when she began
Through the bright quire the infectious virtue ran.
All dropped their tears, even the contended maid.

• “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933) by A.E. Housman — more of “less is more”