/lit/ - Literature

Shakespeare

Jim Morrison.

Jorge Luis Borges.. because his poems are about cool stuff.

Read a poem of his called 'Alhambra' which is about a palace in Spain that he visited after he went blind.. it is compelling

Rimbaud. Because of his legend.

>>4502277
whats his legend?
>tfw Rimbaud looks like shit on OP's painting.

comte de lautreamont.

because the way he combines literary and poetic techniques in les chants is unlike anything anyone has ever attempted. he fully immerses himself into his thoughts and his world, and creates the most beautiful lyrical analysis of his own state the world in which he has to live. it changed how i read poems and novels.

>>4502271
Agree with this. I like the themes Borges uses and it speaks to me like no other poetry.

>>4502290
The debauch, the travel etc

>>4502301
google came up with nothing, do you have a link?

Bo-Bob Dylan. I'm pleb and will admit it.

>>4502462

you trollin? just read his wikipedia

>>4502464
I'm a poet, don't you know it
And the wind, you can blow it

Because I'm Mr. Dylan, the king

And I'm free as a bird on the wing

i love celan for the way he navigated the interior of the nightmare

i love blake for the boundless scope of his vision and the unifying solace that it espoused

they are two likened halves of a coin for me

>>4502486

i'm not gay but my asshole is

>>4502484

Killah Priest.

>>4502488

Based God is my favorite poet.

I'm a pleb when it comes to poetry but Whitman is my favorite.

>>4502498
and I can give a fuck how you dress to be honest,
unless bank account got 15 commas,
try to fuck with me catch knuckles like sonic

>tfw i can't remember what song that was
>mfw

>>4502271

>Oh, Okay, I'll check out this poem...
>...
>It's in fucking Mexican

GTFO wetback pig.

>>4502464
I share the sentiment.

Milton here, possibly Pound. Oh, and fuck Bukakeowski

>>4502017

John Keats for the delicious imagery and Milton for Paradise Lost. But when I really want to enjoy, I read Dylan Thomas because his poems are full of beats I like.

>>4502573
it's argentinian you dumbfuck, go back to /b/

Frank Stanford, because I respect that I'll never finish (or even start) this door stopper.

>>4502630
I started it

it's really good

didn't even come close to finishing it though

>>4502017
Amiri Baraka
Related to my time
don't talk about "how he's hurt because no pussy"
his death made me revisit his work, so he's my favorite poet, for now at least

>>4502630
>>4502634

>mon visage quand i actually bought this ages ago and it's just been sitting on my shelf

this year i will finally get around to it
for realsies this time

>>4502637
actually i went back and watched the full reading of "who blew up america" and realized it was actually pretty bad and he's a bad poet.

>>4502573
JUST SEARCH FOR AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION..... I'M NOT GOING TO ABORT MY OBJECTIVE OF EATING A SANDWICH BECAUSE IT HAS A PLASTIC WRAPPER AROUND IT

Good old copy-pasta is good:

Who is your favourite author?
>William Shakespeare

Which of their works have you read?
>I have read almost all of his plays and most of his sonnets; from the poems “Venus and Adonis”, and “The Rape of Lucrece” I have just read some small strophes and verses.

Why do you love them so?
>His language is the most inventive, beautiful and awe-inspiring in the world. Hi is, by far, the greatest poet of all time. I have read almost all of the English poets, and of the poets of my native language (Portuguese), as well as Spanish poets. I have read the Italians (Leopardi, Dante), the French (I’m a Rimbaud fan), the Germans (Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Hölderin), the Greeks (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Alcman, Pindar), the Latin (Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid), the Russians…hell, I have even read the Japanese (Ono no Komachi, Basho, Hitomaro, the folk songs of the kojiki and Man’yoshu), the Chinese (Li Bai and Du Fu) and the Indian (Kalidasa, Tagore, the ancient epics), always searching for the same metaphorical feast and imagistic orgy of Shakespeare’s work, but in vain: nobody has ever done the same with words. Nabokov is right when he says that “The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays” and Stephe Booth: “Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare’s abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense.”. This guys is the greatest master of language of all human history.

Whom would you recommend them to?
>Anybody with even remote poetical/language interests. Also romantic comedies fans and drama fans.

>>4502290
>>4502462

I don’t have it in here, but on other computer, a epic copy-pasta by some guy called Lynx. If you want I can post it later.

>>4503972

Found it in an old 4chan archive.

Observation: incoming a huge post.

I think I posted this in about 3 or 4 threads about Rimbaud, but since he is a poet who I respect and admire very much, let's go one more time with the infos.

OP, the first thing you need to know is that Rimbud is famous both because of his work as his life (one of the most amazing and strange ever lived - Rimbaud makes Hemmingway a simple poser in questions such as courage and adventurousness).

Let us speak first of his poetry.

>Rimbaud's Poetry

Rimbaud is considered one of the fathers of modern poetry. He was one of the first writers to use disjointed and apparently unrelated metaphors and similes, and strange and kinesthetic imagery. He was also one of the first poets to use free verse and prose poetry.

However, judging Rimbaud as the father of modern poetry is almost a crime, keeping in view the sloppy and deeply obscure state of contemporary poems and poetry: it's a crime perpetrated against Rimbaud to call him the father of such abortions. Rimbaud was a prodigy: at about 12, 13 years of age he showed an extraordinary ability to write poetry, in both French and Latin. His school and his teachers were all proud of him: he won several poetry competitions and his abilities were developing at a breathtaking speed. By studying the Latin classics, Rimbaud learned to master all the classical meters, how to stress syllables in the classical way and the traditional construction of metaphors and similes. His studies of French and European literature familiarized him with the rhyme, and his knowledge of assonance and alliteration was brilliant. Thus, one can realize that Rimbaud, before innovating the traditional verse, completely dominated the classical poetry: all the poetic techniques were known by him. But the majority of writers influenced by him (As Allen Ginsberg and the beatnik generation, and the pseudo-poet Jim Morrison) never bothered to dissect the basic and classic skeleton of the poetic art that was calcified by generations of poets thorough the centuries: they readily go for the non-fixed forms, for free experimentation (without the basis, without the vertebral spine), and thus produced only mediocre works.

>>4504015

As for the poetry of Rimbaud, it is one of the most memorable I know:his bizarre and aggressive images, and his constant exotic/toxic perfume have hardly been equaled. You need to understand that the poetic production of Rimbaud in French occurred between the ages of 15 and 22 years old: namely, his work has never failed to discolor that youthful freshness, that taste and relish in the weird, in the colorful, in the metaphors and similes created to catch the reader's attention by the nose and pulling it to them. Rimbaud's work is constantly screaming at you from the pages, howling and begging for your attention: it's like a firework exhibition - a barrage of flames, sounds and luminosities. Rimbaud always keeps this delight in shocking the reader and waking (actually plucking) the dormant surprise that was rooted deep inside its rooms on the brain (you know: it is not easy to surprise experienced readers).

It must be said, however, that Rimbaud is not one of the main great poets of the world. In reality, he is a poet for writers, a poet for specific readers. His work does not lend itself to all tastes. Rimbaud writes in a monotone, he has only one style (actually a blend of two styles): the weird and wonderful, the strangely aggressive caricatures and the suave lyrical beauties of the nature. Let's compare Rimbaud with Shakespeare (the greatest poet of all time): Shakespeare wrote in several different styles, and exhibited a multitude of speeches, from the simple and routine - like colloquial passages of Twelfth Night: "Out o 'tune, sir: ye lie. Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? " - to the most sublime (the great metaphorical passages such as this excerpt from Macbeth: "his virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off ;/ And pity, like a naked newborn babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air, / Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears Shall drown the wind."). Rimbaud, however, always weaves poems with a mesh of strange and disjointed metaphors: it is as if he always wrote as the fool of King Lear. While Shakespeare is a great feast, with different dishes and a plethora of different flavors, Rimbaud is a extremely strong liqueur, a glass of hallucinogenic liquid pepper that not everyone has the stomach to support. Here, for example, is his biographer Graham Robb speaking about the satirical aspects of Rimbaud's poetry:

>>4504017

"The Rimbaldian human being is a repellent piece of animated vegetation, a poxy assemblage of femurs, sinciputs, scapulas and hypogastria, a prey to cephalalgia, clottings, fluxions, rickets, nits and nasal mucus - a monster in the shape of a philosophical question-mark: if Man was made in the image of God, then what must God be like?
"With its neologisms and barbarisms, its slang words jarring with the drawing-room syntax, Rimbaud's new idiom was dramatic proof that social distinctions in the new France were as virulent as ever. It was also an expression of his hybrid roots: urban and rural, burgeois and peasant."

Of course, there is the other side of Rimbaud: the one that writes lyrical and strange songs, primeval hymns about the woods, about the see and its "starry archipelagos"; the poet that writes that "It’s found we see./– What? – Eternity./It’s the sun, mingled/With the sea.", and poems like:

The fox howled in the leaves
Spitting out bright plumes
From his poultry feast:
Like him I self-consume.

The fruits and the veg
Wait only for the pickers;
But the spider in the hedge
Eats violets, no others.

Let me sleep! Let me simmer
On the fires of Solomon.
Down the rust, boiling over,
Mingling there with the Kedron.

>>4504020

And also he is the poet capable of this orgy of colors, this pictorial rhapsody:

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!


Rimbaud was one of the first poets who I loved; reading him was the first time I discovered how language could be aggressive, and found that literature possessed black and dark corners where it is difficult to breathe. Many of the metaphors of Rimbaud never abandoned me. In Le Bateau Ivre (justly considered the greatest of all the poems of Rimbaud) there are wonderful pictures of huge fat snakes (pythons) sliding on trees, being devoured by lice, and huge leviathans (the beast of chaos) rotting in swamps, mouldering the rivers with its putrescence. And the opening of the first poem in prose from the Illuminations is one of the lightest and most charming passages in world literature about renewal and rebirth: "As soon as the idea of the Flood was finished, a hare halted in the clover and the trembling flower bells, and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web."

As for poetry in translation, don't pay attention to this guys: . Not all of us have time to learn all the languages in witch all the many great poets of the world wrote, and although we may lost some of the beauty and technical power of the original, we will also get several rewards. And other thing: on of the ways by witch the literature of one people and one time is fertilized by the literature of other nation/era is by translation. Actually, the sperm of translated poetry can fertilize the eggs of the brains of other poets, and generate an progeny of new masters of literature. Want an example? You know that Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Milton all wrote their major works on Blank Verse (and that means that Blank Verse is one of the most successful verse forms in the history of world literature - if not the most successful). Well, The first documented use of blank verse in the English language was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his translation of the Æneid. That means that a translation was responsible for one of the greatest verse forms ever invented: Surrey did not saved every technical wonder of the original Latin poem, but he did something much more important: he gave England a new verse form.

>>4504023

>Rimbaud's Life

Rimbaud is the poet who lived the most poetic life of all: there is none like him in the history of literature. He began life as a shy blond rose-cheeked white boy (the son of an extremely religious mother) and ended it as an black arms dealer, slim and tanned by the sun in Africa.

Rimbaud's father abandoned the family when he was a baby, and his mother raised him alone: she forced the children to study for hours during the day, and also to read the Bible and attend church. Rimbaud was up to 14, 15 years a respectful and obedient boy: he won several poetry contests and had the highest grades of the school. However, with the reach of adolescence, he began to revolt, and ran away several times from home, traveling by foot across France, and going all the way up to Belgium. Imagine yourself with about 15 years of age walking alone on empty roads, sleeping under the stars, under the serene, with no money in your pocket to eat, traveling just for the pleasure of traveling: it is something that would awake fear in many people, but Rimbaud did it several times.

When he was 16 years old Rimbaud sent his poems to Verlaine (a famous poet in Paris), and Verlaine, amazed by the talent of the young provincial, collected money with other poets and artists and was able to buy train tickets to bring Rimbaud to Paris(Rimbaud had fled to Paris before to see a popular uprising called The Paris Commune - it is even possible that has been raped by soldiers on that occasion).

When the teenager arrived at Paris, he shocked everyone with his talent and his physical beauty. However, he soon made many enemies because he usually mocking the mediocrity of other poets (one of his trolling examples: in an poetical dinner, when one of the other writes was declaiming his poem Rimbaud shouted, after every single verse, the world "shit": one of the guests, to defend the honor of the bad-poet, attempted to assault Rimbaud and expelled him from the hall, pushing him out of the dining room; latter that night this gentleman was attacked by Rimbaud - who was out there waiting for him - with a knife. On another occasion Rimbaud ejaculated in the latte of a painter) and expended his days drinking and doing drugs like opium and hashish. He almost did not shower, and was a walking colony of lice, flies and fleas.

>>4504026

Verlaine fell in love with Rimbaud and the two began an love affair, so that Verlaine fled, leaving his wife and new-born daughter to follow Rimbaud to England. Latter, in a fight motivated by jealousy, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist, and ended up arrested (he also accused of sodomy).

Rimbaud continued to write until the completion of his only published book Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). The book did not succeed, and around this time Rimbaud stopped writing forever. What he did next was traveling on almost all European countries: Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy. He once was crossing the Alps on foot and ended up getting sunstroke; he was found by a lady on the road, that took care of him. He even got a inflammation caused by the contact of the rib-cage with the flesh caused by his incessantly foot-walking. He worked in various strange departments : as a translator in a circus, and as book-keeper and janitor in big engineering work camps. He never, however, rested in one single place.

He finally ended up in Africa, traveling through several countries, but was in Ethiopia that he began his career as an arms dealer: Rimbaud used to sell guns to Menelik, king of Ethiopia. He was the first European to enter certain sacred cities and to cross inhospitable deserts (he described them as "The presumed horror of the lunar landscapes"). Some of the desert-crossings he did (that took about 3-4 months) were so brutal that camels usually had to be euthanized after the trip because they were totally exhausted and useless for the job. On such trips, Rimbaud carried with him cyanide pills because if he ended up captured by native tribes he would be tortured, and suicide was better than having your own testicles slowly cut off. What he ate were only a handful of dried dates, and he drank some milky water, preserved with strange oils and fats.

>>4504029

He ended up winning a lot of money (he carried a large sack of gold tied to his waste in all the places he go). His mind was so skilled that he also learned several native languages, many now extinct. He could speak more than 15 languages. For a time he lived with Ethiopian with a very beautiful and elegant black woman, who was his mistress.

Anyway, eventually he developed a tumor on his leg (a cancer). He had to return to France, where he had his leg amputated. A few weeks later, with fever and possessed by delirium (he was on colossal amounts of morphine), he died. His body was black (almost as carbon), his hair gray, his body slim and bony. He died with only 33 years of age.

He was certainly one of the strangest souls that this world has ever hosted. So you see, OP, you must also read about Rimbaud's life. Here is a good book about him:

http://www.amazon.com/Rimbaud-A-Biography-Graham-Robb/dp/0393049558/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375317315&sr=8-1&keywords=graham+robb+rimbaud

Gentleman, good night.

Lynx

I found this old archive in this site:

>>/lit/thread/3983887#p3987240

This guy used to hang around here a lot, but I never saw him again. Maybe he is not tripfagging anymore, which is a good thing. Anyway, he sometimes made good posts.

>>4502165

BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE

>>4502165

Nah, you just love his impressive physical beauty. I don’t like his poetry or his music, but I must admit he had one of the most beautiful faces ever. (no homo)

Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettedheim - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ".... The bible of Hell.... ..... the doors of perception...." - Rimbaud: A Season in Hell - Kahlil Gibran / Aldous Huxley / Henry Miller. I'm still not sure what is going on here, but the Poetic Genius is evident.

>>4502573
>all my favourite poets are in Mexican
>even though they're Chilean and Spanish

in all seriousness though my favourite poets are probably César Vallejo and Lorca.

1. William Shakespeare
2. Edmund Spenser

Emily Dickinson, she never left her room
Robert Frost

>>4504259
jack gilbert

the dance most of all

Fyodor Tyutchev or Luis Camoe

Both of their poetry have some emotional resonance with me, thus have had the greatest effect