/lit/ - Literature

Not in our language. Pound and Eliot killed it. The guy had the fucking nerve to write an essay about carrying the torch of a poetic tradition and then wrote the fucking Wasteland. How the hell is anyone supposed to write poetry after that?

>>18861886
It's only characteristic that in the 20th century great poets will have to turn back onto the tradition, to build their poetry off innumerable referencing, than to form just another sequence in that tradition, or of a wholly new tradition.

But at least it was something original, unlike today.

Reconnecting poetry to music and divorcing it from shallow written word. Taking back the name 'song'.

>>18861886
By using individual genius and understanding what made Pound and Eliot so based…. Also, Pound was consumed by a desire to become the English language’s best poet when he was 15 (as per Moody’s biography, Volume One). Someone needs to be like that… but even more productive and erudite in writing. Here’s a lovely moment in The Cantos that someone could learn from (pic related).

>>18862958
>Someone needs to be like that… but even more productive and erudite in writing.
Literally impossible. Besides, just being erudite wont, as the Op says, give you the seer's eye.

>>18861881
>Is there any hope
Let me stop you there.

No.

I have plans to be a great poet. I wish to be a great poet. I won't link to any of my published works because I don't want to out myself just yet, but I do very much want to be a great poet. I want to be the greatest writer and the greatest poet of the entire 21st Century.

>>18862958
Dude, Literature is dead. These same guys that went on and on about tradition and committing at 15 handed us off a dead corpse and nothing to go on. They moved from place to place, took no apprentices, left no formal methods. They even had the gall to write poetry about what a terrible state everything is in. They left us next to nothing besides themselves for us to study, ya know, once we make it out of the absolute desert that is modern youth only to find that there’s no water to be found anywhere on earth once we make sense of their work.

>>18862370
Unironically yes, but for the anglophone that ship sailed a thousand years ago.

>>18863006
>Dude, Literature is dead.
Certain forms may be dead, like novels and novellas, but not short stories or poetry. Independent presses are going to make a grand revolution against the Big Four and there’ll be time to make new ground.
>biographical critiques
Yawn. That’s not how to go about this. Your ought to say something about the historical conditions or forms they worked in (modern epic) creating literary obsolescence but you didn’t. You don’t really sound like you read enough or care enough about Literature to profess its death.

Pound wrote ugly garbage, we need more Robert Herrick's and less pseuds whose pomes don't even rhyme. And fuck off with muh epics already. If you can't even write a catchy little 8 line piece don't worry about epics lol.

>>18863070
>Personae
>Hilda’s Book
>A Lume Spento
>Cathay
All these have short poems. Maybe read around more, anon.

>>18863109
Maybe YOU should learn how to read before "reading around".

>>18863119
Whatever. I know my opinions on literature are more respected than yours because I went to a top 1% school, rather than whatever shithole institution you went to.

>>18861881
How does one go about actually learning to read and write poetry?

>>18863152
Start with Homer unironically.

>>18863152
Anon I am going to be somewhat brutal with you: if you were not born with the poetic spirit, you probably are not going to make it as a poet.

Were you making up little poems as a child? Does your mom record you making up sounds and words? Were you interested in how words sounded as a kid? Did you play around with language even if you were very young?

I think that you can build yourself into a great writer, a great prose writer, through study and effort. But I think that's not the case with poets. I think great poets are born, not made. I think you have to have a certain aptitude for the nature of language and sound that manifests itself from a very early age, if you are destined to be a great poet.

>>18861886
I'd tell you how the torch was carried and the influence of the wasteland and four quartets but that'd be too much for me right now.

Crane, and Williams Carlos Williams pushed the poetry movement in other directions after the wasteland (although self admittedly they both admit to have being set back many years after the wasteland).

Oh, and then American Confessional Poetry made huge swings immediately after Modernism with Lowell's Life Studies. Lowell opened the path for people like Berryman, Sexton,

and then Merril's dropped his epic poem and then john ashberry decided to be better than everyone etc etc etc

>>18862370
We need something like Schubert lieds, but in English.

>>18863171
>anon, I’m going to bullshit you

>>18863171
sadly no

What would you say is the fundamental difference between prose and poetry?

>>18863196
Poetry is auditory at its core. Poetry at its core is still meant to be recited, to be chanted or said out loud. You must have a grasp of the sound of a language, the feel of a language, to write good poetry.

Basically, here's how to tell if your poetry is good: read it out loud. Read it out loud, perhaps with a rhythm or a chant. Does it sound somewhat pleasing? Does it sound like it has a rhythm and a harmony? If it does, you may have the talent to be a great poet. If it doesn't, you might be in trouble.

Poetry has been recited aloud since the days of Homer, and no great poem can exist that does not sound pleasing to be read aloud. The ear, not the eye, is the test of great poetry.

>>18862370
By this logic the truest poetry in the modern day is... song lyrics. But outside of a few token nods like Dylan's Nobel no one seems to want to acknowledge it.

Yeah son, helluva war

I put on my sunglasses,
drive a big truck,
fightin' for Israel,
true patriots fight on.

Aint got no limbs, aint got no brain
Now I truckin on for Israel,
American girl,
cuz freedom aint free

Jesus, will you give my son
Cletus, a McDonalds birthday party
For our sacrifice for Israel

Cuz freedom aint free
Layla took 10 of Trayveon's miles
while I was gone
cuz freedom aint free
and american southern whites have very low irish and scotnigger IQs

The future of poetry is with language not in it. Few realise.

>>18863430
Obfuscated way of saying ebonics and pidgin supremacy in a brown world of simple juju-men

>>18863441
That's racist.

>>18863456
That's black fragility. Stop having so much black toxicity and black privilege and black entitlement, you black mediocrity.

>>18863224
Does that mean that old poetry can only be appreciated properly if pronounced as it was pronounced when written? Should we all be learning to read Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation? Should we all read Li Bai in reconstructed Middle Chinese?

>>18863491
>Should we all be learning to read Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation? Should we all read Li Bai in reconstructed Middle Chinese?
Yes, you mongoloid.

>>18863514
How granular should you be about that? Should you try to approximate the author's exact dialect as closely as possible? (What about authors who wrote for features that weren't actually present in their speech, like Renaissance-era Latin writers who wrote quantitative meter despite not actually pronouncing length distinctions, or Japanese authors writing Classical Chinese who observed 平仄 despite not having tones?) What about cases like Old Chinese or Sumerian where we just don't have the information to reconstruct the pronunciation very well?

>>18863541
>How granular should you be about that?
Like the other guy said - poetry is meant to be sounded aloud, so as granular as the speaker of the said poetry intended it to be.

(Yes, "speaker", not "writer". Poetry is a verbal art form.)

>>18863571
And like I said, what about cases like Old Chinese where we don't have enough information to reconstruct the ancient pronunciation in much detail? (Current reconstructions of Old Chinese are more like a schematic representation of a mathematical model that produces the modern Chinese languages' reflexes, not actual phonetic values.)

>>18863541
Poetry is speaking well. Poetry can only ever be understood as poetry in the context of its language.

This is the problem that /lit/ never gets in these threads: to "revive" poetry would mean a return to the spoken word and its beauty in the various tongues of the world.

>>18863779
Doesn't that imply that the true poetry of the modern day is song lyrics and rap?

>>18863159
What's a good translation to get a feel for Homer's poems?

>>18863047
Well you sound like a run of the mill pseud. Have fun waiting around for that revolution.

>>18863171
> anon I’m going to pull some fairy tale bullshit out of my ass and asset it is true ok?

>>18862370
>>18861886
>>18861898
>>18861881
There is absolutely no technical limitation imposed over the English language that prevents writing decent poetry. The problem is always be about people, and their cynicism and indolence and half-assed commitment to sincerity. If you wrote some kind of epic poem today literally nobody would take it seriously. You would only get memed into popularity at best for being that one crazy guy, and the people who appreciated you would care more about the effort and skill involved than the subject matter and fundamental inspiration behind the text. This is the same for everything from the classics to the KJV. Nobody really connects to anything anymore because modernity has made everyone hollow inside and incapable of truly letting one's heart run free and appreciate things.

>>18863129
>Yeah I can't read a three sentence post but muh school
What?

>>18864116
>There is absolutely no technical limitation imposed over the English language that prevents writing decent poetry.
Art is dead and we have killed it.

>>18861886
>The guy had the fucking nerve to write an essay about carrying the torch of a poetic tradition
What's the essay?

>>18861881
Who wrote this pseud shit?