THE CURSE OF THE COMMA

Making the final draft of my book and beset by the curse of every writer; do I put a comma in this sentence, or do I leave it clean and unbroken. ‘For want of a shoe the horse was lost,’goes a line in an oft quoted refrain. But,you see it written as: ‘For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.’ I don’t know which is correct so I’ve decided to go with the advice recently given by a retired literature professor. To paraphrase: ‘If your punctuation gets the meaning of the sentence across, screw it.’ Damn horse lost his fornicatin’ shoe.