/lit/ - Literature

his works have life lessons - and he tells them brilliantly - the best the world has ever known and probably ever will

nah hes a fagit

>>4886614
Shakespeare essentially invented the modern attitude with Hamlet 200-300 years before it was even a thing, so there's that

good money in gore

Universal appeal

>>4886614
muh human nature
(they ALL say this, why?)

>>4886614

>did we

Speak for yourself.

see bloom's invention of the human

shakespeare taught us how to be human.

>>4886614
Ultimately nothing really.

Ok OP, I'll give you a lesson on this subject. I hope you have the patience to read all the material, and I hope you enjoy.

First: the most striking feature in Shakespeare were not his ideas or his philosophy: regarding these he was completely non-original; his ideas just echoed the long established wisdom and common sense of the common people. He never created any radical and original new ideas: he was quite simplistic in this regard.

The most important characteristic of Shakespeare, what separates him from all other writers (which puts him sitting alone at the top of the mountain while even others literary genius may already be in the snowy zone, but still just climbing its edges) is his verbal inventiveness, especially his ability with metaphor (being metaphor the true meat, marrow and muscle of poetry). Aristotle said in The Poetics that: “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”, and Shakespeare was by far the greatest master of metaphor that ever lived.

>>4891471

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 guy is the greatest master of language of all human history.


Other great characteristic of Shakespeare was his ability to create several different characters, most of them totally alien to his personal experience. There was also his apparent lack of any particular philosophical belief and credo: he expresses several different opinions about life according to the characters who spoke the words or the atmosphere of the play. Most writers write they works trying to convey some general idea or moral (and its no shock to perceive that this idea or moral is most of the time their own vision about the world), but Shakespeare didn’t seem to care about that: he was like a chameleon, changing the colors of his mind according to the body which he impregnated at the moment. He had the poetic character that was described by Keats several years before:

>>4891473

>As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature - how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated - not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children

>>4891479

But there also must be noted that Shakespeare characters are always artificial; they don’t sound like normal people: they are colossal, as if their brains were on steroids. Shakespeare excelled in language, and did not mind sacrificing the verisimilitude and reality in favor of the verbal beauty. If an idea grabbed his mind in the middle of a speech and scene, he was determinate to use that idea, to exhibit that metaphor, even if it was not relevant to the plot or faithful to the character that was speaking, and only for the pleasure and pride of modeling beauty in verses. No one ever spoke like Shakespeare's characters: the human race that he modeled is artificial in this respect: they are as human beings who had took steroids for the mind, who had the brain areas related to language and verbal thinking augmented by some divine touch. Shakespeare makes all humans (even mediocre ones) speak as Gods, as D. H. Lawrence said:

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such lovely language.”

It even seems that some kind of strange metaphorical-parasite have invaded Shakespeare’s brain, laid a multitude of eggs on his crumbs and usurped the synapses of his neurons, in a way that he only could think thorough images, trough metaphor and similes: every fiber and streamer of thought at birth is already mounted by an image, that rides it. In his plays one metaphor tread on the heels of another who has just broke out of its shell, one simile breaths on the neck of another simile that has just been born.
Moreover, Shakespeare accepted any plots, no matter how fantastical and bizarre, provided they were interesting. He did not care to kill important characters without any scruple, and sure he did not bother to set his stories anywhere in the world and at any time in history, without even analyzing the customs of other peoples or epochs: the important thing was to captivate the attention of public (and finding nice opportunities to forge brilliant metaphors and similes)

>>4891487

You must understand that writing is nothing more than putting words in and determinate order; writing is weaving sentences and phrases, using the blocks of words to build the horizontal and inky pyramids of the written pages. And the way in which you construct your verbal-words is by style. You can decide to create an entire universe in the blank pages; to compose the sinews, veins and bones of a whole pack of galaxies and shoal of nebulas; to give birth to a whole cosmos; to mould a gigantic womb fermenting with thousands of different characters and different philosophy’s, but you will only be capable of doing that with words, and by choreographing the dance and architecture of words that is the style.
There is part of a book introduction that I would like to share with you all, gentleman. It is from this book: “Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature” (http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Genius-Classic-American-Literature/dp/1589880358/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375375723&sr=1-1&keywords=literary+genius)), a guide written by many essayists, but collected by Joseph Epstein, a very witty man, who also wrote the quotes from the introduction that I am about to quote:

>>4891492

>“The occurrence of genius may be a mystery, but that is no good reason to get mystical about it. Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of the day, is very generous in assigning literary genius. “I can identify for myself certain writers of palpable genius now among us”, he writes in the introduction to Genius, a book composed with his on essays on writers for whom he claims genius: “the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the English poet Geoffrey Hill, and at least a half-dozen North and Latin American novelists and poets (whom I forebear naming).” But he is considerably less generous in dispensing lucidity on what constitutes literary genius. Genius, he instructs, is “clearly both of and above the age”. He adds: “Fierce originality is one crucial component of literary genius, but this originality itself is always canonical, in that it recognizes and come to terms with precursors”. Genius also turns out to be “the god within”, and genius, “by necessity, invokes the transcendental and the extraordinary, because it is fully conscious of them”. He brings in Emerson and Gnosticism, neither of them great flags signifying clarity ahead, and concludes by stating that his rough but effectual test for the literary genius is: “Does she or he augment our consciousness…has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?”.
>What widens one consciousness and intensifies one’s awareness, may, of course, not widen and intensify another’s consciousness. Or it may not do so the same consciousness at different times at the life of that consciousness, which is way some writers who swept us away at the age of twenty seem not worth rereading at forty. Nor is professor Bloom very helpful on the crucial matter of how literary genius operates, which is, inevitably, through style.
>Style, it needs to be understood, is never ornamentation or a matter of choice of vocabulary or amusing linguistics of mannerisms. Style, in serious writing, is a way of seeing, and literary genius, who see things in vastly different way than the rest of us, usually require a very different style. As Edward Gibbon wrote on style (quote by David Womerseley in his essay): “The style of an author should be the image of his mind”. Thorough this distinctive style something like a distinctive philosophy is expressed, thorough usually not directly: Which is where criticism and plain intelligent reading enter. Henri Bergson holds that understanding a work or body of art “consist essentially in developing in thought what artists want to suggest emotionally.” The style of the literary artist is what allows him powerfully to suggest what he sees.”

>>4886614
Shakespeare invented all of us, my dear.

>>4891498

This excerpt is wonderful firstly because it shows, with simplicity, one of the main flaws of Harold Bloom’s (that incredibly fool man) criticism: he never says nothing about style, he never analyzes and dissects the viscera of an author’s great work, in other words: he never studies the metrical technics; the metaphor construction; the rhyming abilities; the stressing syllables choices; the simile construction; the tools for creating characters; and all the other secrets that really integrate the flesh and blood of a writer’s work. The only thing that Bloom does is stating, with no prove or evidence (but only assertion), that author A is better than author B, that author C is more important than author D. He’s prose is a soup of strange philosophies names glued together (Scholl or resentment + agnosticism + cabala, and etc.), and he is perpetually forgetting the work of a writer to rant about feminists and minorities invading universities and the classical canon. He is a man that has read a lot, but that learned little about literature.
My friend, don’t say that style is not important: it is the most important thing in writing. If you want to discover the immutable truths about the world, if you want to really feed your wisdom and knowledge, I suggest studding math, chemistry, physics, biology, and other sciences. Literature is, above all, a way to deal with words.
There is one anecdote that I hear, but that I don’t seem able to remember properly who the main characters in it were. All I know is that they asked an old and important writer how he judged the young beginner writers, and he said something like: “If a boy tells me that he really feel that he has something to say about the world, that he has truths inside of him that he wants to put on paper, I know that he is not going to far; but when a young man tells me that he likes to play with words, to construct phrases, to test new sounds, to write only for the pleasure of writing and telling stories, than I think that he may have a future”. So, if you want to be a writer, don’t worry yourself with what is going to be said, but with how it is going to be said.

>>4891505

You know , to me there are two main species of literary critics: a) those who try to interpret what the author meant with his text and b) those who analyze the literary techniques used by the author (metaphors and similes creation, versification , metrification , the structuring of dialogue, punctuation, uses and transformation of source material, descriptions, creation of stream of consciousness: style in general).

In my opinion the critics of category (a ) ( which are by far the most abundant and the most famous - Harold Bloom, for example , is one of them ) are generally useless and, in general, pretentious : you have every reason to want to make your own understanding: who are these gentlemen to have the authority to say what the author wanted to convey through his text? If they can discover the meaning of an author’s text, we also can.

As for the critics of category (b), I must say that they are special people: they spend their whole lives doing a strenuous job than earns them no money and no fame, just for the sake of the love they have for the artists who they are analyzing. The reading of such critics should be constant for young writers: there is nothing that favors more the formation of an young author than the analysis of the bowels of the works of the masters (that and also reading and writing a lot and constantly, of course). Unfortunately critics of category (b) are few and little known (even among serious readers). About Shakespeare, I advise (for those who really want to delve into the work of the author, and not so much for the casual reader) to read the following books:
>Shakespeare’s Imagery, by Caroline Spurgeon;
>Shakespeare’s Language, by Frank Kermode;
>Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, by George T. Wright;
>The Development of Shakespeare’s imagery, by Wolfgang Clemen;
>The Poetry of Shakespeare’s Plays, by F.E. halliday;
>Shakespeare’s Uses of The Arts of Language, by Sister Mirian Joseph;
>The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays, by B. Ifor Evans

>>4891514

Well, as a Coda to this review about Shakespeare, let me talk briefly about his most beautiful metaphorical techniques: the fusion of abstract and concrete language.

The marriage of concrete and abstract language is one of the most powerful tools of a poetical arsenal. Want an example? If concrete and abstract language should not be mixed many of the most glorious passages of Shakespeare (better that almoust anything else in recorded literature) would not exist, such as:

that 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.

(here, for example, Pity is an abstraction, but is connected with the concrete image of a babe)

Or

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drownèd honor by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.
But out upon this half-faced fellowship!

(here the most string passage is that of honor being plucked by its locks; well, Honor is an abstraction, and it certainly had no locks and cant drown. But this passage is better than anything that Pound – a man who condemned the fusion of concrete and abstract in poetry - ever wrote).

>>4891471
>>4891473
>>4891479
>>4891487
>>4891492
>>4891498
>>4891505
>>4891514
>>4891522
Two questions:
-Why are Portuguese speakers on 4chan so based? Seriously every time someone says something good on 4chan I later learn that their native tongue is Portuguese. Same goes for Italian and Greek.
-What is a guy like you doing on /lit/ of places? Don't you feel alone among all the free will, DFW and literay life threads?

Shakespeare wasn't an author. He was a playwright. You don't 'read' Shakespeare, you watch his plays. The scripts were never meant to be read in themselves, they're guides for other play producers and actors etc.

>>4891546
What I'm hearing is,
>I don't have the patience to sit down and read his plays.
What about The Rape of Lucrece?

>>4891563
You would think that, because you're a fucking Moron. Shakespeare's plays are plays. You don't read a fucking play, you watch it.

>>4891541

Well...first of all thank you for your kind words and for not complaining about me posting this one more time. After seeing the same kind of threads being made again time after time I just decided to copy-paste an answer and post it whenever the opportunity arises. I have other pastas on topics like Rimbaud and War and Peace, for example.

But, to answer your question, I am here because I like /lit/: there are lots of things that I learned here, mostly indications of works that might interest me. Just today I discovered in /lit/ two great books: “Shake Hands with the Devil” by Roméo Dallaire and “The Rape of Nanking”, by Iris Chang.

Also: I almost don’t have any friends, so I come here a lot to have a twisted form of social interaction ;_;

>>4886614
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Based Portuguese anon. I am comforted when I read something like your postings in my current role as Romeo when the direction is oft sub par and the supporting cast lacking in energy and sometimes talent. But at least the role has been rewarding for me.

>>4891568
You read it, then you watch it. Maybe back in the day, you could sit down in the theater and watch a verse play, and it would all make sense immediately. But it's 2014. If you don't read the verse, then you're gonna miss out on a lot of subtleties. Dick.

>>4891546
There's that authorial (RIP) intent again.

>>4891623
When was the first time the popular critics or people threw out author intent

I think I've never bothered thinking about author intent when reading a work or music or movie or game. It came naturally to me.

>>4891616
holy shit, I bet this nigger is for real, too.

>>4891634
Oh my jesus, fuck you, retard.

>>4891616
>everyone is as retarded as I am and needs to read through a play's script before seeing the performance of a play

topmost chortle.

Shakespeare was like a...singularity.

>>4891645
>taking the easy way out
>patting yourself on the back for it
The difference between the right way (read then watch) and your way (watch) is that the right way has another step, which you skip, you lazy retard.

Sons of Anarchy is fun, it has parts of Shakespeare adapted to it.

>>4891569

I'm not this guy>>4891541
but damn, these are some great posts, a joy to read, now I feel like reading Shakespeare again

>>4891804

Thank you for your kind words.

>now I feel like reading Shakespeare again

This return is going to be a pleasure to you, I'm sure of that.

>>4891569
can you post your pasta on Rimbaud?

Our boy Shake invented the liberal point of view currently in use.

>>4892637

Yes. Hope it will not disappoint you.

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.

>>4892716

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:

>>4892721

"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.

>>4892727

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.

>>4892728

>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.

>>4892730

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.

>>4892734

He ended up winning a respectable amount 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

end

>>4892716
why do you call Morrison a 'psuedo' poet?
i understand that his work hasnt really lived up to his famed esteem, but why does that make him a pseudo?

>>4892748

Sorry, I was unfair with that criticism. I just think that Morrison fame is much more a product of his extreme physical beauty than of his verbal talents. But he is not a pseudo-poet - his poetry made apart from his songs is actually quite good sometimes.

>>4892739
do you have anything on Baudelaire?

>>4886637
Are you fucking kidding? Humans only figured out how to write a couple of thousand years ago. You really think no one will ever surpass a writer from the era when the printing press was invented?

>>4892969
Writing is on the way out breh.

Cervantes was more important to literature and the nature of men than him, but Shakespeare explored more facets of men in his work.

>>4892998
agreed.

>>4892998
cervantes was not more important to literature, no way

>implying you can fully appreciate Shakespeare's poeticism without hearing his work in the accent they were intended to be performed in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qabr7nyHpVc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXkAI5nJm24

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXkAI5nJm24

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Iu3H3jCIM

>>4893142
>From hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and from hour to hour we rot and rot. And thereby hangs a tail.

You wouldn't understand this line unless you know that 'hour' was pronounced the same as 'whore,' and that 'ripe' might have been pronounced the same as 'rape.' The 'rot and rot' was probably a reference to an STD. Possibly syphilis?

>>4893191
*tale

>>4893191
got a reading of that?

From the book Why Things Are by Joel Achenbach:
Why Is Shakespeare Considered So Much Greater Than Any Other Writer?
Because he's English.
The Shakespearean myth spread across the globe, transported by British imperialism. The Bard became a touchstone for Anglophiles everywhere. To insult or ignore him would be to eschew British culture and civility. He was not just a great poet, he was England incarnate.
The playwright's notoriety then fed on itself. Shakespeare became an industry. For the common man attention to Shakespeare proved one's high-mindedness; for the actor a new interpretation of an old Shakespearean role established one's skill and originality; for the scholar the ability to cite Shakespeare was indispensable for intellectual discourse. Thus you find otherwise sane people wasting their time scrutinizing the tedious extremes of the canon, such as Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, Part 3, and Cymbeline.
We offer these answers fully knowing that hard-core Shakespeareans will froth at the mouth and gurgle in bilious protest, citing the depth, breadth, and imponderable brilliance of everything Shakespeare touched, his humanity, humor, and honesty . . . but in the very ferocity of their attack they prove how far gone is the Shakespeare cult.
For our part we love the guy, except for Hamlet, which seemed to us to be full of horrible cliches (for example, "This, above all, to thine own self be true" and the supercliche "To be or not to be, that is the question"). Even if we cede the point that he is the greatest writer of all time, his reputation is still out of control. As in all fields of human endeavor, it is possible to be the best and still be overrated. Shakespeare is, quite frankly, the Elvis of literature.
Visit any library and you will see shelves—nay, whole wings—that creak with books dissecting and masticating every word that the dude quilled, our favorite being Henry Ellacombe's 1896 volume, Plant Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare. At one point we were thumbing through the October 1859 issue of the American Journal of Insanity (we saved our back issues) and found an article entitled "William Shakespeare as a Physiologist and Psychologist," by A. O. Kellogg, M.D. "Many [medical] facts not known or recognized by men of his age appear to have been grasped by the inspired mind of the poet," Kellogg writes. He cites Falstaff's reference to sherry-sack making the blood "course from the inwards to the parts extreme" as evidence that Shakespeare knew about the circulation of blood, which was not officially discovered until twelve years after his death.
We have to agree with Gary Taylor's book Reinventing Shakespeare: "Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. ... If Shakespeare is a literary black hole, then nothing that I, or anyone else, can say will make any difference. His accreting disk will go on spinning, sucking, growing."

>>4893303
http://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s?t=7m59s

around 8:00

>>4893326
>the supercliche "To be or not to be, that is the question"
Fucking dropped.

>>4893382
>We offer these answers fully knowing that hard-core Shakespeareans will froth at the mouth and gurgle in bilious protest, citing the depth, breadth, and imponderable brilliance of everything Shakespeare touched, his humanity, humor, and honesty . . . but in the very ferocity of their attack they prove how far gone is the Shakespeare cult.

i'm going to bed. i've missed you /lit/, glad i decided to check in.

>>4893391
>I'm so right and anyone who disagrees is a hoodwinked Shakespeare fanatic
a dishonest attempt to dismiss any criticism beforehand

>>4893326

>"This, above all, to thine own self be true"

A cliche placed in the mouth of the insufferable old dodder, Polonius.

It's like dude never watched "Clueless"

>>4893391
I didn't froth at the mouth. I dismissed his opinion because he easily dismissed one of Shakespeare's finest soliloquies while saying he appreciates the canon. To say you like everything but Hamlet strikes me as contrarian as fuck.

I agree that Shakespeare's fanbase can be fucking retarded. Those books at the end of the passage prove as much.

>>4893326
>"and the supercliche "To be or not to be, that is the question"
What's cliche about that? The sentiment or the language?

>>4893421
(1) Obviously, it wasn't cliche in Shakespeare's day, right?
(2) I read that the expression had a weird meaning back in his day.

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-misunderstood-lines-in-literary-history.php

>>4893437

It absolutely would have been understood as a cliche in Shakespeare's day. Polonius practically leaks cliches, as if he was compsed of them.

The article you cite has it exactly right. I didn't see mention of any "weird meaning."

>>4893447
What I mean by "weird meaning" is that he isn't saying, "hey, man, be yourself." He's saying, "hey, man, you gotta look out for numero uno."

>>4893437
"Brevity is the soul of wit" is by far his most misunderstood line. People quote it without the irony of Polonius using it during a completely superfluous monologue, the one in which Gertrude responds with the famous "more matter, with less art." It isn't advice from Shakespeare

>>4893450

> O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
>why are you a montague?

fucking hell.

>>4893457
Right. I think it goes without saying, he was very verbose. Sometimes there's an analysis that says, "this character was feeling nervous - that's why he was speaking in such long, latinate sentences," but that's messed up - long, latinate sentences is just Shakespeare being classy.

Daily reminder that Shakespeare is the OG of gaming hoes, yo.

>from King Lear

GLOUCESTER
But I have, sir, a son by order of law, some year
elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came something saucily into the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair; there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged. Do you know this noble gentleman, Edmund?

'Good sport' being banging big-booty hoes with soft faces and perfumed pits. To lay a woman is the play the most timeless of games, son.

>>4893326
>>4893391

It also bears mentioning that the scene in which Hamlet delivers that monologue is far from unambiguous. We must remember that, throughout that scene, Claudius and Polonius are surveilling the supposedly despondent Prince--who, again, we must remember, is *acting craaaaaazzyyyy*. It is a matter of some weight for both a director and the actor playing Hamlet whether he is aware that he is being watched. If he is, the whole speech takes on a completely different sense and resonance.

brilliant mind, but hugely overrated

O,
Can my sides hold to think that man, who knows
By history, report or his own proof,
What woman is, yea, what she cannot choose
But must be, will's free hours languish
For assured bondage?

>>4891471
I wouldn't agree with this. Hamlet is a non-cognitivist, somehow I doubt that reflects the established common sense of the time (or even ours, of course).