/lit/ - Literature

t sometimes happens that a field of study arises and organizes itself around some big problem, standing before it unignorable and demanding to be solved. It seems to me that such a thing happened, say, in linguistics. After European scholars realized the similarity of Sanskrit to Ancient Greek and Latin, it was soon understood that there was a Problem involved with explaining such coincidences, and in general with the systematic working out of the theory of the relationship and development of languages. Almost all the development of linguistics in the 19th century can be understood as an attempt to refine and solve this problem.
There is just such a Problem standing before scholars of literature, a large and natural one: to explain the transition of almost all world poetry to free verse during the 20th century. The rare exceptions—Russian poetry being one of them—do not abolish the rule. These developments took place at different times in different languages and cultures, but gradually all of them converged and arrived during the second half of the century at the same destination: what Gasparov called “international free verse.”
What was in the air in the 20th century to make free verse so attractive to authors and readers that was not in the air in, for example, the 19th? I have found nothing but generalities on this subject. And yet this Problem has the advantage that everything took place recently, and the articles, letters, manifests, and memoirs are still preserved, as are some of the participants. It may be that a convincing and interesting answer to this question requires the creation of new words and new sorts of explanation. It’s certainly better than dancing a ring-dance around the corpse of poststructuralism, or whatever it’s currently popular to occupy oneself with.

>>20823470
I'm not a poet myself. That's the only book on poetry I've read so far, and just reading a few poems a day (Ray Bradbury's suggestion, along with one short story a day).

SALUTATION
O generation of the thoroughly smug and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake and do not even own clothing.

>When Milton writes
>>‘Him who disobeys me disobeys’
>he is, quite simply, doing wrong to his mother tongue. He meant
>>Who disobeys him, disobeys me.
>It is perfectly easy to understand WHY he did it, but his reasons prove that Shakespeare and several dozen other men were better poets. Milton did it because he was chock a block with Latin. He had studied his English not as a living language, but as something subject to theories.
>>Who disobeys him, disobeys me,
>doesn’t make good verse. The sound is better where the idiom is bad. When the writing is masterly one does NOT have to excuse it or to hunt up the reason for perpetrating the flaw.
>...
>Shakespeare was greatly indifferent. He was fanciful. He was a technical master. The gross and utter stupidity and obtuseness of Milton was never more apparent than in his supercilious reference to ‘Woodnotes wild’.

SALUTATION
O generation of the thoroughly smug and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake and do not even own clothing.

Poetry is a composition of words set to music. Most other definitions of it are indefensible, or metaphysical.

>Time and again the old lie. There is no use talking to the ignorant about lies, for they have no criteria. Deceiving the ignorant is by some regarded as evil, but it is the demagogue's business to bolster up his position and to show that God's noblest work is the demagogue. Therefore we read again for the one-thousand-one-hundred-and-eleventh time that poetry is made to entertain. As follows: "The beginnings of English poetry... made by a rude war-faring people for the entertainment of men-at-arms, or for men at monks' tables."
>Either such statements are made to curry favor with other people sitting at fat sterile tables, or they are made in an ignorance which is charlatanry when it goes out to vend itself as sacred and impeccable knowledge.
>"The beginnings — for entertainment" — has the writer of this sentence read The Seafarer in Anglo-Saxon? Will the author tell us for whose benefit these lines, which alone in the works of our forebears are fit to compare with Homer — for whose entertainment were they made? They were made for no man's entertainment, but because a man believing in silence found himself unable to withhold himself from speaking.

Where does one start with Ezra Pound? I’ve been reading TS Elliot and loving it. What works of Pound should I read before trying to take on the Cantos (which is, as I understand it, his magnum opus)? What works not by Pound (besides the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy) should I read before the Cantos? What are some essential Ezra Pound works to read?

You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them.

> -Ezra Pound

What the fuck was his problem?

I have Ezra pound reading Usura and other parts of the Cantos on my MP3 player.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn6r2Nm0ZMo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fUEYs3TsFA

>>7992751
Ezra?

bump for sources