I have been programming in Lisp for a few years, and I think that Lisp programs are verbose, and not terse at all. This is because Lisp special forms and functions tend to be explicit and self-contained, which makes Lisp code more robust and easier to change and compose, than more terse notations that leave a lot of details implicit.
Non-trivial programs are just shorter to write in Lisp than many other languages, partly because the Lisp primitives are better thought out, and partly because that explicitness turns out to be more concise than working around the implicit special-case rules and poor error handling of other notations, that you end up needing to do in larger programs. Things that work for one-liners may not work as well once you get past one thousand lines.
You also see this in Common Lisp with DSLs like LOOP and FORMAT, which seem convenient until you run up against their limits (part of the reason why many people dislike them). The thing is that it is much easier to go from fully delimited/explicit to terse and implicit than vice-versa, if you have good primitives. Because of dynamic scoping and read macros, you can do really terse DSLs in Common Lisp in a very straightforward way (for example, Andrew Sengul did an APL subset that can be wrapped in a read macro, and I think sed would be pretty easy to do).
