/lit/ - Literature

>>9619443
Because they're garbage. Pound was the definition of a pseud.

If I was impressed by babby tier mathematism I'd be teaching high school calculus not reading poetry.

>>9299060
Any suggestions on where to start with Pound? I assume the cantos are tough going so I don't want to dive right in there or is it worth just getting stuck into them?

>>9212129
>>9211414

What does /lit/ think about Ezra Pound? Trying to get into his Cantos at the moment

>>9185324
>degenerate nigger music is dominating the market while classical becomes more or less irrelevant

Recently, I've been reading The Cantos, and a lot of Pound in general. One thing that has sparked my interest is that he first began his literary ambition with a very clear direction in mind. He studied only those poets who he considered the absolute greatest. He even went so far as to dismiss the likes of Ovid as "second tier" poets who made minor discoveries, and eschewed Virgil and the vast bulk of the Western Canon all together.

Frankly, this is inspiring. I've always had literary ambition, and I've always wanted my reading to enhance my writing. Also, desu, I've always been extremely skeptical of the majority of what I spend my time reading. I'm a big proponent of the "I'm going to die" at some point school of picking up books, so naturally I'd be attracted to a guy like Pound who tried his hardest to cut through the bullshit to ensure he read only the best and only what would make him a better poet.

So, basically, I want to pick up where Ezra left off. I want to make a long ass work worth ripping my hair out over, and I want to make sure that every piece of literature I am consuming is as worthwhile as what helped Ezra Pound construct The mothafuckin' Cantos.

tl;dr This is another shitty list post. It goes across all mediums (mainly fiction-aiming prose and poetry).

Thus far I have narrowed down my focus:

Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns
Orestia
Theban Plays
Poems of Sappho
Poems of Catullus
Metamorphoses of Ovid
***MAYBE*** The Decameron
Divine Comedy
Old English Poems (Think Seafarer)
As Much of Spenser as I can stomach
The Canterbury Tales
General Ren. Poets (think Marlowe, Johnson)
Collected Shakespeare
Don Quixote
Poems of John Donne
Paradise Lost
Poems of Robert Browning
Complete Works of Goethe
Madame Bovary
David Copperfield, Bleak House, Journals of Charles Dickens
Middlemarch
Persuasion
Jude the Obscure
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
All of Joyce (Minus The Wake)
The Cantos
To The Lighthouse
Absalom, Absalom
Mason and Dixon

I'll probably throw Ibsen, Proust, Mann, Sterne,Turgenev, Melville, Borges, and maybe Bartheleme in there for fun

Any suggestions or refutations to help me hone this list???????

ALSO: Discussions on how the most modern piece on this list was written like 20 years ago :(

>>8120760
He looked best after he went insane

I've been gone all day and come back to my thread to see none of you answer my damn question, baka f^m, yall are homies though for posting in the thread, thnx

I wouldnt mind a crazed pound leading me through the circles of hell

Post cool pics of authors.

>>6547510
This is exactly what he wants.
You've been bamboozled.

>>6533597
Reading sad books that are also good usually makes me happy

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241042

And don't forget to read Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era.

Thoughts and examples

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/cherry-blossoms

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247910

All modern poetry sucks. Now it's said and it does not need to be said again ITT.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever. - Ezra Pound in ABC of reading.


Reading the pamphlet it seems to me that Ezra wanted everyone to be proficient in circa four languages. Including One or two dead ones.

So how do you learn a dead language /lit/?

I have heard the name polymath used in reference to Stephen Fry.

>Who is the x of literature?

Whitman
Pound
Byron
Pushkin
Eliot

Don't you wish you could pleb like me?

I've been in heated debates with friends over this, and I figured it may be a fair argument to bring to /lit/...

When analyzing a work of literature, is it best to question the author's purpose/intent, or is it best to ignore the existence of the author entirely?

In one instance, we are inspecting the work through a lense of expectations. We understand the context of the author's life, and we try to interpret their literature on a grounds of authorial intent.

On the other hand, we eliminate the idea of the author entirely (assuming that this is purposed by the author) and allow the story to unfold and come to meaning on a basis of its own reality. We do not look for authorial intent, but rather understand the characters and scenarios as happening without the dependence of an author.

Obviously these are two very differing schools of literary thought, but which equates to a more thorough understanding of the work at hand?

Ezra Pound

>>1996278
Even when he was old he was still pretty fit.

greatest poet ever... or greatest poet ever?

The years were not kind.