/lit/ - Literature

>>4588408
>I write poetry with clearly discernible talent.
>I am better than the kids from whom I seek affirmation.
>They don't give it to me.

Post some of your stuff, faggot.

Simply because they don't understand poetry. They lack knowledge.

>Take poetry writing workshop taught by a professional, well-published poet
>Classmates writes poetry with clearly discernible and relatable themes, unique imagery, and attention to structure, form, and verse
>I write obscure free verse filled with vague solipsistic metaphors
>Prof likes my stuff, gives me constructive criticism where it is duly needed, but generally favorable feedback
>Classmates fail to understand my work and harshly criticize me because it isn't filled with adolescent posturing and emotionally empty navel-gazing

Read the Latins, OP.
Keats is quite bad. Byron > Keats, but the Romantics were awful in general (the English and the Germans all). Alexander Pope was a better poet; still, go to the Latins. Try and learn Latin, you will benefit enormously from it.

>>4588445
You've never really read the romantics, have you?

>>4588445
I don't agree with you on the Romantics. But it would certainly benefit me to delve into the poetry of classical antiquity.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2428/2428-h/2428-h.htm
Pope's Essay on Man.

>>4588447
They are awful.

>>4588449
The sooner you throw away the Romantics and pick up the Classics the better, so try not to delay.

>>4588454
Why are you such a heavy proponent for the classics?

>>4588408
Because poetry workshops are one step up from poetry slams, and poetry slams are one step up from grafitti. Why are you surprised that it's full of vulgar people, including yourself?

I'll define vulgar, for the sake of clarity. Vulgarity is secret enmity with the entire world. Vulgarity is secret shame and humiliation in the face of the entire world, evident through their boyish resentment and touchiness. The idea of rank horrifies them, because they assume (probably correctly) that they are at the bottom rung. They reject all authority because they are pondscum and servile to all. They refuse to admire anything but themselves - they can't relax, they never feel themselves to be secure. They attempt to reassure themselves. They like music from such and such a decade: people don't like real music anymore, they're such sheep, I have real taste. Likewise with literature - usually entry-level works like 1984, Wordsworth, sometimes the Bible - less often the Antique Classics since those actually require sincere interest and effort to read in the original.
These are ordinary people.

Why do your fellows reject tradition? Because it stands over them and frowns like their father/priest/schoolteacher and makes them feel their dicks shrink. The facts that these proletarian cattle are writing poems more complicated than nursery rhymes or pop songs is a pretty sure sign that they are batting above their league. Chances are you're just trying to one-up them in terms of style: I've been in that position, so I know. My advice to you is to ignore the social aspects of literature. Read like you observe a landscape, write like you're pondering something, except without rambling or daydreaming. Avoid focussing on golden ages that have passed - the Elizabethans and Romantics - consider going further afield and learning to speak in an accent that your readers have never heard before. I'd wager that part of the reason they're scoffing is because you're writing with a Romantic "accent," independent of subject matter - this makes them want to fight the power and burn their ties and generally behave like puerile little slaves.

>>4588454
Dan?
Why such a hardon for the preromantics?

>>4588445

ahahaha byron was the shittiest romantic out of the well known ones (wordsworth, shelley, keats were all better)

byron only has popularity because of his escapades

i agree pope is arguably better than all of them though

>>4588458
I never said I wrote like a Romantic. I just like Keats. And damn bro you have some serious mental issues. I'm aborting this thread

>>4588466
I disagree there is real beauty in his works especially in Childe Harold's pilgrimage.

>>4588471

mediocre tripe that doesnt deserve to even be compared to something like the prelude

>>4588456
It's a straight path from the Romantics to the complete collapse of art that we bear witness to in Postmodernism. Romanticism lacks an object, a goal; it is all about transient feeling, transcendental ejaculations that fade after a moment. The Romantics discarded the idea that art had a purpose to instruct, that art was subservient to morality and reason and truth; they championed "art for art's sake", which is the beginning of the death of art, just as the chant of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" was the beginning of the collapse of Old Europe.
The Classical and Romantic approaches to art are so fundamentally different. In the Classical the artist is not important, what is important is the art. In the Romantic the artist is this brooding, perpetually misunderstood genius who needs to "express himself" and push humanity forward. Romanticism is to adolescence as Classicism is to maturity. In Romantic art you get a brooding, malcontent spirit; craggy rocks and mountains of doom. in Classical art you get a noble, serene spirit; wide fields and clear skies.

>>4588466
It's:
Byron > Wordsworth > Shelley > Keats.
They are all bad, however.

>>4588475
Can't you appreciate classicism and romanticism?

>>4588467
You asked a question and I answered it, "bro." Did you just want us to pat you on the back?
I guess I confused you by using words like "shame" and "horrified" - you probably thought that I was ashamed and horrified. Don't worry, it's a common mistake among people who not read words much goodly.

>>4588475
>Byron > Wordsworth > Shelley > Keats.
this must be the WORST ranking in the history of humanity

Keats is one of the best English poet, you pleb.

>>4588478
In the same way you can appreciate Nazism & Judaism, i.e. as a person who can't make up his mind or commit to anything, and just likes to taste things. Classicism and Romanticism don't mix. In order to appreciate both you'd either have to have two souls or no soul at all.

>>4588475

i can see why you'd place byron ahead of the rest with such a hardon for classical styles

i'm hardly a fan of Romanticism, as a style or movement, idea, philosophy whatever, but Byron is lucky if he gets compared to those 3, he's mainly dismissed as lackluster by anyone who has actually read them all to compare

honestly it's laughable that you'd place him above the others, there's no good reason for it at all, his style and control of form is severely lacking, he's still enjoyable but not a great poet at all

for me it's:

Keats>Shelley>Wordsworth>>>>Byron

although wordsworth is arguably the best, i just have a bit of hatred for him and his romantic ecology, it's hugely influenced how we view nature today in britain and it's a massive steaming turd of tripe

>>4588486
>Classicism and Romanticism don't mix
>thinking of art in binary, manichean terms
>doesn't understand the essence of beauty and aesthetics
>thinks it's all a monkey show and it's about who's the best
go kill yourself, already

>>4588408
Students, even plenty of undergraduates in English literature, are completely ignorant of meter and verse because it's no longer considered important. The reasons for this are complex, but it stems mostly from the attitudes of the modernist poets, and their various offspring, as well as changing social attitudes towards the value of literature as a subject, and the liberal arts in general. (Philosophy is suffering similarly.)

>>4588458
> I'd wager that part of the reason they're scoffing is because you're writing with a Romantic "accent," independent of subject matter

This guy is a little nuts, but this is probable. Look closely at your diction and try to purge it of archaic and elevated language, and see how people respond then. I'd wager your classmates wouldn't respond as badly to somebody like Larkin, Stevens, Frost, or any of the many contemporary formal poets.

>>4588483
No, Byron was right about Keats:

>Here are Johnny Keats's piss a-bed poetry [...] There is such trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them [...] No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don't I must skin him myself: ther eis no bearing the driveling idiotism of the Mankin.
>The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are [...] why, his is the Onanism of Poetry -- something like the pleasure an Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street Walker in Drury Lane. This went on for some weeks: at last the Girl went to get a pint of Gin -- met another, chatted too long, and Cornelli was hanged outright before she returned. Such like is the trash they praise, and such will be the end of the outstretched poesy of this miserable Self-polluter of the human mind.
>Mr Keats, whose poetry you enquire after, appears to me what I have already said: such writing is a sort of mental masturbation -- he is always frigging his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his ideas into a state, which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.

Keats was a plebeian who was trying to write noble poetry, and the result is that he comes off as a poseur. His poetry is all about taste; he is a wine-sipper.

>>4588497
>His poetry is all about taste; he is a wine-sipper.
And for this reason it is the highest form of poetry one can ever dream to achieve.

Blake hits all these niggas out of the park

>>4588499
Yeah, if you are a pseudo-intellectual that likes to sip wine and speak in an artificial accent, not if you are a human being.
Old Beowulf far surpasses Keats and the Romantics.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-h/16328-h.htm#I

>>4588493
Yeah pretty much this.
>>4588486
*tips menora and *siegs heil.

>>4588475
>In Romantic art you get a brooding, malcontent spirit; craggy rocks and mountains of doom.
You mean like in Macbeth?
Guess ol' Bill should have written about happy, happy swains molesting pink cherubs, or whatever it is the Augustans went in for.
I'm a Hellenist, by the way. I also dislike the Romantics, but you can keep your powdered wigs and padded calves. Honestly, what the fuck? The 1700s was the single most dull and constipated period in all of English literature. English imitations of French imitations of Roman imitations of Alexandrian imitations of the real source, Greek literature.

>>4588493
Classicism and Romanticism are too opposing aesthetics. If you appreciate both you are probably one of the "art for art's sake" people who will appreciate excrement if it's put in a museum and called "art".

>>4588504
So, do you have a mental disability, or it's just that you don't know what "taste" means?
How is appreciating the immanence of things, tasting it, a pseudo-intellectual (or intellectual at all) matter?
Keats surpassed all the Romantics for the very reason that he was the only one who was able to avoid thinking, to silence himself.

>>4588497

no, byron was just a huge snob about anyone who wasnt an aristocrat

so was the literary establishment at the time in general

>>4588507
I said I favour the Latins. I spoke of Pope as a superior to the Romantics, not as a great poet.

>You mean like in Macbeth?
There's a LOT in Shakespeare that I do not like. His mind was all over the place. His plays are filled with crap jokes and pornography.

>>4588511

yes you can only appreciate one idea of everything and must limit yourself in your own mental prison

git tae fuck

>>4588511
> If you appreciate both you are probably one of the "art for art's sake" people
>who will appreciate excrement if it's put in a museum and called "art"
You don't make any sense, try again, son. Why do you talk about things you don't know? "Art for art's sake" is symbolism and modernism, which stemmed from romanticism, and it has nothing to do with putting shit in a museum. How can you be so ignorant?

>>4588511
Comedy and tragedy are too different. If you appreciate both, you probably have no taste.

Let me pretend you're not an idiot and ask: what about Hoelderlin and Goethe?

>>4588516
>not liking Macbeth
I bet you don't like Hamlet either, aye?

>>4588511

You're the literal definition of a dilettante.

>>4588518
>>4588512

Let me give you a metaphor. I am like a man who is faithful to his wife; you are like men who never cease in "sampling" woman after woman. I have virtue, you have mere variety and pleasure.

>>4588525
>implying literature isn't just the love of everything that exists in the world
you sadden me

>>4588521

to be fair macbeth is a weaker tragedy than say hamlet or king lear

>>4588525

*tips fedora*

>>4588527
True. But Macbeth has stronger symbolism and imageries, it's also darker.

Blake>>Keats>Wordsworth>>Shelley>>>>>>>>>Lord Byron

>>4588521
Hamlet is Sartre & Camus before Sartre & Camus. No, I don't like it.

>>4588520
Goethe is too Romantic. Hoelderlin I haven't read, but I suspect he was similar. I dislike German Romanticism as much as English Romanticism.

>>4588520
>Comedy and tragedy are too different. If you appreciate both, you probably have no taste.

No. Comedy & Tragedy is a question of artistic form. Classicism & Romanticism is a question of aesthetics. You can vary the form as much as you like as long as the aesthetics are preserved (which really means that you can't vary the form all that much. There is far too much experimentation in modern art.)

>>4588535
Your first mistake was to think of art as ideological movements, and forcibly impose on distinct authors "labels" so they can fit into the tiny categories of your tiny minds.

Goethe, for one, isn't romantic.

>>4588540
>Goethe isn't romantic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(Goethe)

>>4588544
the distinction would probably be too subtle for someone as vulgar as you

>>4588516
...Even that I find questionable. Some of the short lyrics of the Romantic period were excellent - probably because they were forced by metrical limitations to stop being blowhards for a while.

I guess the Shakespeare business is a matter of taste, but I'll say this: he once irritated me - I was all for Sophoclean style - but eventually I got used to it, and was opened to a better reading experience because of that.

I'll just post this link to the prose criticism of Ezra Pound. He's neither classic nor romantic, and despite being a modernist iconoclast, he actually had a sincere love of form and civilization. It's a shame he couldn't finish the project of renewal he started. We're left with his demolition work and a few half-completed structures...

>>4588535

yikes get your head out of your ass

p.s. learn german and read some goethe, you will benefit hugely from it, as you'll have actually read something you're spouting shit on and realise Goethe purposefully distanced himself from German Romanticism, by using a lot of classicism, completely obliterating your idea that they must be separate

b-b-but genres must not be mixed!!! we must keep art separate and pure, then i can view myself as having chosen the one true aesthetic path

>>4588544

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Classicism

>>4588475
Oh. It's you again.

>>4588503
This. This. This.

>>4588545
>>4588549
>>4588555

rekt

>>4588548

I agree with most of this, if you're still around: What do you think of Yeats?

Pound and Yeats are my two favorite modernist poets.

>>4588548
I agree about Ezra Pound. He was probably the greatest literary genius of that era (that T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrue Stein, Virginia Woolf, etc., era). Still, I don't like him. It's like with the Romantics: I think Byron is the best, but I still don't like him and do not read him now that I know better.

>>4588549
>>4588555
Yes, I'm aware that Goethe later came to his senses and realized that Romanticism was garbage. He said his first novel, Werther, was "everything sick", didn't he? Well, he was right. Werther is a typical Romanticist work and it is horrible.
I will learn German, my friend, and I will read Goethe's more classicist works. I must say though that I'm not that excited. I don't like the classicism of that era so much (that includes Pope & Addison in England, Racine & La Fontaine in France, and Goethe & Schiller in Germany). Their works are too Humanist, they lack God (don't tell me that God is mentioned in their works. I know He is, it's just that He doesn't play a central enough role). I prefer the Latins because their poetry had a better mythos; they believed in the gods. The Classicists of the 17th-18th century are more or less godless.

>>4588571
> The Classicists of the 17th-18th century are more or less godless.

cont. they were too affected by Enlightenment philosophy, the so-called "Rationalist" view. These takes a lot of the pathos out of their art; you need mythology in order to maintain a robust pathos.
The Romanticists had only "the beauty of nature" for their mythos; that's how degenerate they were. The Postmoderns don't have a mythos at all.

>>4588535
Hoelderlin was an arch-romantic who revived Greek unrhymed metres (much more complicated and technically difficult and the ol' workhorse pentametre) and translated Antigone. Then he went insane.

>No. Comedy & Tragedy is a question of artistic form. Classicism & Romanticism is a question of aesthetics.
Disagree. Form and aesthetics interact. An eclogue, a satire, an elegy, an epic - what are these if not different aesthetics channeled through established forms? A modern novel is a fairly formless thing, and predictably, it encompasses all aesthetic moods and tendencies.
>There is far too much experimentation in modern art.
Agree. It's not as if the principles of verse, metrical and rhymed alike, have to be rewritten, we can safely say we've escaped the plodding pentametric pastorals of Pope and Wordsworth, now it's time to start building something.

>>4588408
Most undergraduate classes are popularity classes more than anything, at least in terms of you getting positive feedback. It's more likely that they just don't like you.

>>4588571
>believing that Pound is better than woolf, joyce, or eliot
>doesn't like goethe and 18th cent. lit because of its "lack of god"
fuck me, you are one basket case

>>4588408
>unique imagery
Got me good.

>>4588571

Please stop posting.

Or get a trip so I can filter this pseudo-intellectual garbage.

Let me restate my position.

I would characterize YOUR (the people that have contradicted me) position as the idea that art is inherently good, that "artistic" is a word of praise. As such, you can appreciate any and all forms of art.
I don't think like this. In my view, for example, Beethoven was an awful artist. He was a genius, and yet he was an awful artist, because his music had a bad influence on people, on art, and on society. In order to be a good artist you have to be a good man; you have to have good principles and wisdom in your breast, otherwise you will spread ignorance and evil.

>>4588571


you're like someone from /pol/ who has skim read a few classics and criticism on it and are now trying to sound intellectual about it all

it's painful to read

>>4588577
>Then he went insane.

The Romantics have made a tradition of this. Look at Nietzsche.
It's because madness lies at the bottom of Romanticism. The Romantics hate Reason.

>>4588580
Pound edited T. S. Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway. He made them. He was the midwife of that period of art. His own art might not have been as influential but he certainly had a better mind than those other three.

>>4588585

tell me why art has to be 'good', moral, whatever

and who are you to define that

>>4588525
>I am like a man who is faithful to his wife; you are like men who never cease in "sampling" woman after woman. I have virtue, you have mere variety and pleasure
>monogamy is inherently a virtue
Oh you.

>>4588589

certainly hemingway...but eliot and joyce, eh, hard to really say who was 'best'

>>4588585
>I would characterize YOUR (the people that have contradicted me) position as the idea that art is inherently good, that "artistic" is a word of praise
but this is simply NOT true.
you don't reject artists, you reject MOVEMENTS in art, which is a terrible mistake, and a deeply vulgar one.
I don't like Byron, not because he is a "romantic" (lel, what does that mean), but because I don't appreciate his poetry. Sorry for liking "arts", and not "ideas", you sick traditionalist fuck.

>>4588590
See this image: >>4588445

It's not that art has to be moral; it's just that art has to be moral if it is to be good art. Immoral art is immoral, it's evil.

>>4588591
>monogamy is inherently a virtue

I said "faithful". Faithfulness is a virtue.

This thread is all the reasons why you should never attend poetry class: Bunch of dumbasses trying to argue their opinion like they have a basis for it.

>>4588594
>I don't like Byron, not because he is a "romantic" (lel, what does that mean), but because I don't appreciate his poetry.

In other words, Byron doesn't make you feel dem feels like Keats does.

>>4588595
>I said "faithful". Faithfulness is a virtue.
And why's that?

>>4588597
Yes. Good rephrasing.
>tfw no tender keats loving

>>4588595

fine replace have with should and answer me again, ta

>>4588598
Ask God.

>>4588596
Just attend them and listen to the lecturer, at least you can get a degree out of it. I hate classes where the focus is on the students talking, they're either frustratingly quiet or two or three guys trying to impress girls (who obviously date guys outside of fucking English classes anyway)

>>4588603
How long until He answers?

i bet dollars to donuts that 'well-published' means his teacher put out a few chapbooks and got into some e-zines.

>>4588603

god's dead m8, i think you need to catch up on the last 500 years of humanity

>>4588601
Why SHOULD art be moral? The same reason why everything should be moral.
I have no respect for art that is immoral. People that believe in "art for art's sake" (in other words, they believe that Art > Morality) respect all forms of art. These people are sick. They eat healthy food and poisoned food and are too dumb to tell the difference.

>>4588609
The last 500 years of humanity need to catch up on eternity.

>arguing this guy

you're not gonna get anywhere with someone whose basis for all of his opinions is something you fundamentally reject

>>4588612
that's it, you are just like a kid who's just read "art for dummies" and who just regurgitate nonsensical theories.
please inform yourself

>>4588617
As the guy you are referring to, I agree.

We each have a fundamentally different positions. My position is that art should improve me, make me a better man. Your position is that art should satisfy you, make you feel tingly feelings.

>>4588618
Everybody keeps rudely accusing me of being a kid and being a pseudo-intellectual. Which of us are behaving like kids here?

>>4588618
Pretty sure it's OP who's satirically adopting different elitist attitudes.

>>4588622
>Everybody keeps rudely accusing me of being a kid and being a pseudo-intellectual. Which of us are behaving like kids here?
next thing you're gonna say that you feel oppressed and victimised.

dude, why do you have to have all those prejudices about art? when are you going to understand that authors are not moved by ideas, but objects, not theories, but life?

>>4588622
the bible says nothing about art. you're overstepping your boundaries m8.

I've said this on /lit/ a few times: it's better to read one good book fifty times than read fifty books just because they are famous or are in the so-called "Western Canon". You'd be better off reading Plato's Republic 50 times than reading Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Mill, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. You'd be better off reading Virgil 50 times than James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Byron, Shelley, Keats . . .
People have this view that the more you read the better. These people that want above all to be "well-read"; who think that need to be familiar with ALL of humanity; equally familiar with the healthy side of humanity and the sick.

>>4588629
>the bible says nothing about art.

Are you sure?

>>4588622

thats not my position, i havent posted anything in this thread so you cant possible know my position

your false dichotomies are tiresome, and you need to try to understand other ways of thinking about art

your position is based upon God and some sort of spiritual improvement, plenty of people want to be improved without God and using modern art as a way of doing it, others couldnt care and just want to enjoy aesthetics, its impossible to categorise everyones personal experiences and motives for taking an interest in art

>>4588626
>dude, why do you have to have all those prejudices about art?

Art needs to be criticized.

>when are you going to understand that authors are not moved by ideas, but objects, not theories, but life?

I would not separate ideas & objects, theories & life.

>>4588565
He's a favourite of mine, but I'm mostly buried in ancient literature at the moment. I like to draw inspiration from little known places.

>>4588612
Hellenist here. I recommend a dose of Nietzsche.
Here's some bait to lead you to the poison. It's very relevant to your interests.

>>4588637
>your position is based upon God and some sort of spiritual improvement, plenty of people want to be improved without God and using modern art as a way of doing it

People cannot be improved by modern art, because modern art is a poison. The only way that they can be improved by it is like people are improved by vaccines that contain the disease, so that the immune system can be built up to defend against it. If a person can study modern art and see how thoroughly sick it is, then I suppose he could benefit from it: he'd know what sickness looks like, and how to avoid it.

>>4588644
You're just repeating yourself at this point, it'd be better for you to find another angle. More poet slamming, less religion.

>>4588631
Pff. Well, enjoy your hamster wheel. I read and contemplate, form my own ideas, read another and contemplate, augment and alter my ideas, as often in opposition to the writer as under their influence. I develop.
I do agree that attempting to read everything or even "a lot" is bullshit, that quality beats quantity, but I can see by your lists that you're reducing an ocean to a goldfish tank.

>>4588643
Nietzsche was a good exegesist of art. I think his Nietzsche contra Wager is his best work.
His morality, epistemology, metaphysics, poetry, etc., is absolutely insane, but he understood European culture.

>>4588644

this is basically you admitting youve read hardly any modernism and are getting your opinions on it from secondary sources

>>4588656
No. Modernism is plagued with destructive philosophies and doctrines, and absurd and ugly aesthetics. Nobody can be improved by these things.

>>4588662
go fuck yourself

/thread

>>4588655
cont. in fact, Nietzsche should have just stuck with being a Professor of Philology. It was his greatest talent by far.

>>4588665
Your rudeness does not surprise me because you are a consumer of modern art. Read the Latins and you will cease to be so vulgar.

>>4588662

nice opinions on things you havent even read bro, your opinion sure is valid

wittgenstein's philosophy is utter garbage in my opinion, by the way, i havent read any of it, i'm just saying this because he wasnt born in the 13th century so is obviously going to be writing bullshit

>>4588668
you are the vulgar one, and should have nothing but vulgarity in response.

I've finished reading the Nietzsche excerpt. It's a wonderful passage and it is all true; it's a damn shame that Nietzsche did not practice what he preached, because Also Sprach Zarathustra is romanticist dreck.

>>4588670
We are both vulgar to be honest. Let's not kid ourselves. The difference is that I know the difference between art and vulgarity. Modern Art is all vulgarity and no art.

>>4588675
cont. also, Nietzsche & Byron were both right about Shakespeare. Shakespeare is full of profound thoughts and images but his art is an overall monstrosity. It's best to avoid Shakespeare.

>>4588668

>Read the Latins and you will cease to be so vulgar.

Bitch, have you even read Martialis?

>>4588631

I don't think I've ever disagreed with something on /lit/ more. Are you kidding?

>>4588655
I won't argue, but I think you may find his moral theories explain modern culture (1969-????) pretty well. The whole resentment for authority and tradition, without any ability to replace them. It's something to consider, anyway.

To be honest, The Bible offers all the poetry a man could possibly need. The Psalms alone are poetry enough for an entire lifetime. To want more is the sign of a voluptuary.
Think about it. You can only truly memorize so many poems. You can only absorb a few poems into your soul. If you try to soak up the entire Western Canon you will be end up a bloated sponge like Prof. Harold Bloom. I think if a man stuck to The Psalms alone and seriously considered every word of them, and sung them to himself every day - he could be a saint.

>>4588702
so many weirdoes on lit, it's making me want to go atheist

>>4588697
Yes. He's right to diagnose a hatred of authority. Anybody who understands the French Revolution can see that it leads to the horror of modern Marxism, which is all about envy and resentment.
Still, his (Nietzsche's) solution to the impending nihilism was insane.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Nietzsche should have become a Christian. Christianity was exactly what Nietzsche needed. He was a sensitive soul who, because of his illness and lack of recognition in social life coupled with his immense genius and potential, became a megalomaniac. If he had taken up Christianity he would have been humbled and would have made a great pastor.

>>4588702
>>4588662
>>4588644
this stupid /pol/ reactionary cunts are killing this board

>>4588475
>the complete collapse of art that we bear witness to in Postmodernism.

the real question is is this THE most feckless, blandest genre of posturing known on /lit/?

>>4588721
Postmodernism is barbaric, m8.

>>4588716
this

>>4588709
The whole point of Nietzsche's philosophy is that Christianity unscrupulously surmounted morality and did away with any creative, masculine tendencies that humans had and inverted them completely.

And you're telling me that he should have become a Christian?

>>4588740
I'm telling you that the thing that Nietzsche must misunderstood was Christianity, and that, yes, he ought to have become a Christian. Christianity was the solution to all of Nietzsche's many problems.

>>4588745
>>4588745
And what was one of Nietzsche's problems?

>>4588745
christ

>>4588745
I think he knew that all too well, but aimed higher. And continued with his destruction, seeing no other choice but to let the second great decay of civilization - the first being the end of hellenism - clear the slate for something new. I know it's fashionable to pretend Nietzsche has nothing to do with Fascism - after all, leftists find him so useful to batter down opposing ideas - but he was the life and soul of it, and perhaps he could have been the seed of a new world, had the other side won in World War Two.

>>4588747
Megalomania, insanity, misanthropy, self-loathing.

>>4588758
Except fascism focused on morality defined by the few. Nietzsche opposed the will to power, but I believe viewed it as necessary means for naturalistic wills spurred by the human spirit, the free spirit conditioned by other free spirits.

>>4588766
All of these things are objectively attributed to morality, however, as a means to maintain sheep-herd mentality, which Nietzsche also tackles in his books.

Most of the time in his novels, Nietzsche spent time disproving philosophers who surmounted morality. That's why Nietzsche's philosophy is poison to you, and still so relevant today. Because he opposed all forms of structure except a structure which strived to promote the free spirit as much as possible.

Thanks to Sartre we know his ideas are indeed compatible in a governmental form with communism, but you wouldn't like that because all the 'progress' we've had under Christianity and capitalism has been motivated by greed.

>>4588789
>Thanks to Sartre we know his ideas are indeed compatible in a governmental form with communism
Haha. What?
Mister "Never make equal what is unequal" himself is compatible with communism?
The man who considered the Greek slave states, the Roman slave state, the Venetian oligarchy, closest to being perfect societies?

"Thanks to Sartre..." Hah. I really have to remember that one.

>>4588525
>appreciating works of many genres and time periods is equivalent to infidelity
Get a load of this classicsdrone.

>>4588799
>Never make equal what is unequal
That's exactly his point. That Christianity and capitalism put everyone under the same greedy lens no matter their qualities. The value of your worth YOU are born with.

This is what helps, genealogically, to progress the human race forward. Charles Darwin knew this, and we deviated from it dramatically. We should have shifted our evolutionary progress from physical qualities to mental. But instead we hit a hurdle: the Jewish old testament.

Priests are the most holy, this land is ours because we say so, this text is holy because it is. It is a document of circular logic, and ironically dooms itself with Genesis, by proving that humans are inherently descendants from murderers and deceiver. So thank you for mass producing a document which has entrapped humanity and continuing to believe in its existence simply because it is influential.

Think for your god damn self,

>>4588585
>In order to be a good artist you have to be a good man
I guess there goes most of the racist, misogynistic artists of the past. There goes the alcoholics, drug addicts, pedophiles and the depressives and a goodly chunk of great literature with it.

>>4588807
You are so muddled that I don't know where to begin.

The simplest mistake, then. The old testament was the story telling of a handful of middle eastern tribes. It's telling that you consider it a turning point in human evolution (of all things!) - I'm guessing you've only recently escaped attending mass and sunday school.

>Christianity and capitalism put everyone under the same greedy lens no matter their qualities. The value of your worth YOU are born with.
I'm not sure you know what you're saying. Both equate individuals as blank slates. So does communism. If you are familiar enough with science to have stopped being a tabula rasa egalitarian, then it doesn't make sense for you to be a communist. I suggest you research heredity, /pol/ should have a lot to say on the subject. Oh no, Nazis! But shouldn't you do the honest thing and find out if it's wrong?

>Think for your god damn self,
Thanks for the advice, you little paragon of rebellion against something or other. The communist darwinian schoolboy who believes that the mind is separate from the body, and who doesn't like greedy lenses.

>>4588824
>Racism
>Bad

0/10 try to be more subtle

>>4588845
>Thanks for the advice, you little paragon of rebellion against something or other. The communist darwinian schoolboy who believes that the mind is separate from the body, and who doesn't like greedy lenses.
I'm glad you recognize who I am, that's the first step to being a nihilist.

>>4588851
>racism
>not bad
please leave, you edgy fuck

>>4588857
I agree wholeheartedly. Pass the butter.

>>4588857
>>4588845
Oh yeah one more thing. I've never said the mind is separate from the body. Nietzsche never said that either. He knew that free will was composed of thinking and sensations, as well as your personal emotion. The sensations is the physical applicability of your thoughts and emotions.

>>4588867
Gibberish. I'm done spoonfeeding you.

>>4588458
mfw pol actually convinced some neckbeard to read evola

>>4588891
>mfw you've been so brainwashed that you think of Evola as some kind of fascist philosopher instead of a natural continuation of Nietschzes traditionalist thoughts

Evola is pretty influential in modernist philosophy.

>>4588908
>Evola is pretty influential in modernist philosophy
no.

>>4588496
This. The liberal arts have been denigrated to a frilly extra-curricular that doesn't deserve to have rigor applied to it. Then people criticize them for supposedly having no intellectual rigor.

If you treat it as a game, then it's going to be a game.

>>4588445
>Keats
>bad
>tenderisthenight.shiggy

>>4588475
>>4588445

Pope >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Keats >>Shelley >>>>> Byron

Pope isn't really a contemporary, I know, but he still blows them out of the water.

>>4588908
lol how do you get me making fun of you to me thinking that evola is fascist? zzzz

>>4588497
You do realize literally every negative criticism hurled at Keats in his lifetime was clearly rooted in classism and barely about his poetry, right?

>>4588931
The poverty of his class and the poverty of his poetry were related. They were right to criticize him for being of a low class, because his low class was reflected in his poetry. He stinks of a pleb trying to enjoy "the finer things in life". You know the type; he was the hipster of his time. Byron called him "shabby genteel", which is what a pseudo-intellectual hipster is.

>>4588571
>capitalizing He
We all know where we are

Post a poem of Keats' that is superior to this of Byron:

Fame, wisdom, love, and power were mine,
And health and youth possessed me;
My goblets blushed from every vine,
And lovely forms caressed me;
I sunned my heart in beauty' eyes,
And felt my soul grow tender;
All earth can give, or mortal prize,
Was mine of regal splendour.

I strive to number o'er what days
Remembrance can discover,
Which all that life or earth displays
Would lure me to live over.
There rose no day, there rolled no hour
Of pleasure unembittered;
And not a trapping decked my power
That galled not while it glittered.

The serpent of the field, by art
And spells, is won from harming;
But that which soils around the heart,
Oh! who hath power of charming?
It will not list to wisdom's lore,
Nor music's voice can lure it;
But there it stings for evermore
The soul that must endure it.

>>4588458

You sound like an insane man. I like your writing, though.

>>4588458

You're a mad and beautiful writer.

>Chances are you're just trying to one-up them in terms of style: I've been in that position, so I know

Show us some of your work, you fucking cunt.

>>4589002
Fine. Why does everyone think I'm mentally ill?

A mind as narrow
As an archer's view
Forecasts itself
And forgets its soul
Which standing skinless
In the here and now
Bleeds, dries and falls
To a pile of dust.

>>4588458

I like you, your writing, and this little snapshot into the way you think. I'd buy you a beer if I knew you in real life.

>>4588574
Unless they have no 'ethics' and limits in their art.

Blake was more profound than all of the other Romantics combined. He was the greatest English poet to ever live.

Keats being second most in the rung.

This post is objectively correct.

I blame free verse and confessional poetry.

Free verse for being too deceptive. People think it's a lot simpler to write than it is.

Confessional because it's just masturbatory, look at me and my feelings bullshit.

>Why is form and traditional Western poetic beauty so shunned by the modern youth?

Because they don't know what it is.

>>4590004
You're welcome

>>4590003
>look at me and my feelings bullshit.
but that's... what poetry is. Art is automatically masturbatory, that's the point.

I don't get OP's butthurtness, do you expect poetry to sound like cliche fedora romantics? Language evolves. I bet you also think any music that's not Classical shouldn't exist.

>>4589999

I'm having a little trouble getting through his Songs of Innocence. Are his Songs of Experience better?

>>4590030
>>look at me and my feelings bullshit.
>but that's... what poetry is.

pleb detected

>>4589186
...

Given your original post I expected something ... different.

>>4590030
>but that's... what poetry is

You're part of the problem. I highly doubt you've actually read any poetry from before 1960.

>>4589186

>Why does everyone think I'm mentally ill

Displaying a fierce ardor for the medium you love, doing so with passion and not using a trace of irony or self-deprecation, the equivalent of a literary wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and writing with your level of condescension and anger, might lead some to think you're off a few screws.

I personally enjoy your fire, and what you said in regards to treating literature like a landscape needing to be observed endeared me to you immediately. I hold the same convictions and am willing to discuss them with anyone of a similar state of mind, but here, elsewhere, and throughout most of the internet culture, such intensity is seen as naive, silly, strange or so forth.

That's my interpretation. I could be off entirely. But for what it's worth I like your snippet, like the level of ambition implied in your writing, and I hope you continue in whatever endeavor it is you're currently pursuing.

>>4590030

Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, Beowulf, and much of Shakespeare are not about one individual's distorted and cynical feelings.

Art at its finest is an all-encompassing structure of mind, history, and spirit. Poetry discussing one man's feelings as he wakes up in the morning and thinks about his girlfriend is poetry, too, but it is not the sole definition of the craft. And, bearing my two pennies, anyway, I do not think it is anywhere near being the best of it.

>>4588458
>Because it stands over them and frowns like their father/priest/schoolteacher and makes them feel their dicks shrink.

a metaphor like this can only be a projection

>>4590183
>Displaying a fierce ardor for the medium you love, doing so with passion and not using a trace of irony or self-deprecation, the equivalent of a literary wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and writing with your level of condescension and anger, might lead some to think you're off a few screws.
DFW and Don Quixote were mentally ill.

>>4588631
I agree with this. Rereading is infinitely more important than reading.

>>4588408
So you just want us to say you are a good poet, or that your classmates are shitty poets? Or that free verse is bad?

Seriously, why did you start the thread? Is your professor's approval not good enough?

>>4590202

I don't know what you're trying to imply. Many people, both writing sort and non, are or were mentally ill.

And we currently live in an age where any sort of 'unorthodox' behavioral trait can be construed as sign of mental illness.

>>4589186
I thought your classmates didn't like you because of your attention to structure, form, and verse?

>>4590216
wiat, lel, you're shrivel poster. Yeah whatever poetic rancor shines from your rant is 100% gone in your poem

>>4590216

He's not OP.

And there's nothing wrong with his excerpt.

>>4588479
>"bro"

HAHAHAHHAHAhahhahhaha holy shit

You're on 4chan you pretentious douche

>ad hominem

no Im not arguing any of points, Im arguing that youre a pretentious douche

>>4589999
>sh-sh-sh-shakespeare

Your post is objectively incorrect

>>4590222
It's bland to me (but subjective because it's poetry).

I called him out (mistakenly) because the OP looked down on his classmates for using free verse.

>>4589999
and Milton you queer

>>4588445
Can I still be classical if my writing brings about an anarchist revolution

>>4590243

>It's bland to me (but subjective because it's poetry)

Fair enough. I felt the simplicity reflected the statement. It's a melancholy expression, like a rain-drop fallen and swallowed, rather than something profound and lingering. I don't think he would just show off his best, anyway. I was the one who called him a cunt and demanded he post. 'Cunt' is my term of endearment.

>I called him out (mistakenly)

I figured. I just thought I'd clear it up before he comes back and dishes out his own responses. I've enjoyed what the thread has generated so far.

>>4590246
You won't bring about anything if you lose yourself in the past. If you find modern poetry ugly, invent something better. God knows the world is waiting for it.

>>4589999
quads = true

>>4590245
Milton a romantic? He inspired them, you can even argue he was their primary influence, but was he one of them?

>>4590191
>>4590059
>>4590081
I didn't say poetry was PERSONAL feeling. But there is feelings in it and the evocation is the whole point otherwise it'd just be prose.

>>4590240

He was a better playwright than poet.

Regardless, Blake is the greatest English poet to ever live. A poet so brilliant he created an entire philosophical schema and path to divinity with the raw scope of his poetic vision.

He was a prophet - the artist perfectly realised.

Plus quads confirms that I am objectively correct, so there is no point fighting it.

>>4590081
>reading things from before 1960 for anything besides historical context and genealogical understanding

>>4590064
You mean proliferate rage? I try to curb that most of the time.

>>4590183
I'm surprised that I made an impression. But thank you.

>>4590192
It's just recycled Freud, used for insult value.

>>4590216
You've mistaken me for the person I was replying to originally.
Structure? It's structured to high hell, man. The metre goes like this:

-x-x- |
--x-x |
-x-x |
--x-x |

-x-x- |
--x-x |
-x-x |
--x-x |

But it's just an idle tinkering of mine, a prototype.

>>4590358
>reading things from before 1960 for anything besides historical context and genealogical understanding
you must be trolling

>>4590891
it's p. reasonable

>>4588458

That is some grade A psychopathy, right there.

>>4590358
sweet heavenly fuck.

Everyone's arguing about middling poets like Keats, Shelley, and Byron (seriously, he's bad), and no-one's talking about the GOAT Romantic Coleridge? Shame on you all.

>>4593179
>GOAT Romantic Coleridge

He's objectively the best of them.

>>4593179
>not wordsworth

>>4593191
Wordworth's poetry is prosaic and dull.

There's no disputing he was a technically skilled poet, yet his themes and turgid verse lack the passion and imagination Coleridge imbued into his poems.

In short:
Christabel >>> The Prelude

>>4590030
>fedora romantics
Outstanding. Just... out-fucking-standing. New depths, new lows, bitches be outcaptaining Captain Nemo up in here.

>>4590030

>fedora romantics

I really wish you fucking one-dimensional meme parroting dullards would realise just how anti-intellectual this buzzword has become.

Go back to fucking Reddit with your fucking Easy-Bake homogenised opinions you fuck.

>>4589999
>>4590245
Blake > Milton

>>4590306
i think he meant about blake then keats being the greatest ever

>>4588408
OP there were people like you in every era, they're called reactionaries, they never win, just get over it and jump on the tumblr train so u can selfpublish and sell some books