/lit/ - Literature

You are retarded

Fiction is for children.

>>10246149
Enjoy your airport novels.

Anybody can get poetry who is willing to do the work. Very few of us are in this late, deeply distracted age.

But that don't mean the Emperor has no clothes. It just means you're illiterate like the rest of us.

>>10246149
t. someone who just found his poetry journal from middle school

>>10246159
How would you go about learning to understand poetry (if that's possible)?

>>10246261

Bloom's "How to Read and Why" would be a good start, at least the introduction (which is only 30 pages or so).

Start with easier, shorter poems. Here's a few I'd recommend:

>Wordsworth "Lucy Gray"
>Auden "September 1, 1939"
>Celan "Death Fugue"
>Housman "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now"
>the "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" monologue from Macbeth and the "To be or not to be" monologue from Hamlet
>Pound "Villonaud For This Yule"

If you want to take on something a little longer, then try "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Coleridge.

You learn how to read by reading. Slowly. It takes a long time for it to start returning dividends.

>>10246261
Start with trying to get a grip on meter. Learn about iambic, and practice writing out randoms lines in iambic:
because I could not stop for death
Then read poems written in a certain metric foot (see line given above for Emily Dickinson and iambic)
Then practice a poetic form. Then study another form and poem. Byron's Destruction of Sennacherib is a really great anapaest poem which an effort to emulate it alone would take great skill. Read Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats, Poe, whoever tickles your fancy really. But find poems and poets that stands out to you. Then practice free verse. You'll rely heavily on rhyme at first, but as you develop your understanding of meter and language you'll begin to better rely on your meter over your rhyme. But that will take at least several months of much practice. Take your time at first, baby steps, and do not expect to do great quickly because you will not.

>>10246261
There are various books on the subject, e.g. The Art of Poetry by Wolosky.

What is the difference between prose and poetry?

>>10246335

There's plenty of gray area between them but generally poetry is lined, metered or rhymes. Prose is sentenced and paragraphed (like an essay) but tries to achieve literary affect (unlike an essay).

>>10246335
Here's a prose poem for you, just because I can:

"--look at this room. These are empty walls around an imaginative mind. They mean nothing outside of what meaning they are given--and so it is for the life you are living. It occupies a vacuum of particles while a momentary snippet of their instantaneous existence is captured by a series of electrical impulses. And as the empty walls are thusly so, so are you a hollow mirror pinned to them. And in that empty room and hollow pane are you the light and life to ignite and retain. Then, other empty walls strung by hollow mirrors will contain the frames and lights of life too looking somewhat similar to you."

>>10246335
It's poetry if you
space --
your
lines
-- like this;
random punc-
-tuation
optional

>>10246350

>>10246261
Work backwards from postmodern poetry, then modernist, then Gothic and Romanticist, then finally your Prototypical Rennaisance stuff like Shakespeare.

People hate on postmodern poetry, but think of it like a poem without nerding out over meter. A good one to examine that's short and deep is "Inside the Apple" Yehuda Amichai. It's a very hopeful poem about mortality and interpersonal connection. Focus on the meaning behind each phrase and how it creates a narrative; narratives come naturally, snapshots are harder. If your reading isn't the same as a critical one, don't sweat it. Postmodern poetry is especially open ended. Others I like are Blueberry Picking by Heaney, Famous by Nye.

Modernist poetry is a bit harder and has a lot more references. T. S. Eliot wrote some great ones, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is amazing and can be connected to a lot of modernist literature.

If you can get through that you'll probably be OK, Romanticist poems I find are actually not that bad, if you like novels Robert Burns is a huge inspiration to Steinbeck, and Poe is a very famous Gothic writer.

From there I think you'll be fine.

>>10246149
Wow you really convinced me with your extremely well thought out argument. I hate poetry now.

>>10246261

You got some good recommendations, although I think some of them are "overboard" if your goal is to simply understand poetry. They can be intimidating.

What have you learned in HS? Unironical question. We were taught lithistory, the basics of meter and symbolism and the poetic devices. If you know these you'll be able to understand poetry, although you might not fully appreciate it.

For symbolism, think something like
Rose = love
Tulip = feminin, woman
Fire = passion, love, destruction
Fall = aging
Winter = death

There are always multiple layers to a symbol. Sometimes their intended meaning is context dependent.

To practice, choose a poem and mark the meter, rhyme structure if it has one, underline alliteration, repetition, then analyze the other poetic devices used. Pick apart metaphors, similes, metonymy, personification, etc. "X is likened to Y, because they share Z." Something like this.

There are many more aspects to study, but imo you should begin with these.

.t litstudent currently tutoring HSfags for beer money