I programmed some Lisp in school.
My impression is that it was based on a 1950s theory of human intelligence, making it the 'AI' language of the future - except it wasn't.
Only on a very high abstract level are our minds like recursive logic trees and even then not so much.
So whole architectures were built on a dead end idea that was fated to be inefficient and unmaintainable.
Lisp syntax has a sort of poetic elegance though.