/lit/ - Literature

i recommend starting with longer forms and working your way back to the lyric

>Nabokov vs Dostoevsky

But they're both terrible.

>>6421240
The ode less travelled by Stephen Fry

Nabokov spoke English, Russian, French, and German. That's four languages.

>>6421240
read out loud

Wasn't one of Nabokov's relatives involved with Dostoevsky's trial that landed him in Siberia?

>>6422175
based

>>6422165
well its a pity he cant tell a decent story in any of them LOL

>>6421240
>Paterson by William Carlos Williams
>Orientale by Cummings
>Neruda
>The Teeth Mother Naked At Last by Whitman
>Daddy by Plath

That should get you started

>>6421277
I'm sorry. Is your work immortal? Are you even published? Then please stop.

>>6422225
ROFL!!!!!!!!

>>6421240
check out this channel on youtube. he does excellent poetry and prose readings and sometimes provides good commentary

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRKwFdsTSXeERjxe8wHfbig

>>6421240
Poetic Designs by Stephen Adams is a good book for learning all the basic shit about how poems do stuff. Get that and just find a poet you like and get a big collection of their poetry. Let your interest develop naturally from there.

What poet will interest you will largely depend on your personality. Some people won't like moralists like Coleridge or Johnson, some will love that part of them. Some will see Byron as self-centered and shallow, some won't. Some will find Larkin to be a grouchy and insufferable bore. Etc.

Wrong as it is, people want to find poets who think like them. And that's a fine way to get started with poetry, so long as you move on from that to appreciating poetry as poetry. I'm not saying that's all there is to it--I'm no modernist--but you won't start out with any kind of feeling for versification. And when you develop that sense, poems will start to make more sense and give greater pleasure.

The only other thing I'll say is don't start with the moderns. I don't mean avoid all poets of that era; some have less to do with modernism than others. Frost and Yeats are fine to start with, but Pound won't do you much good.

The Romantics are probably the easiest to get right into because their meanings aren't obscured, their sentiments aren't too sentimental, and they did away with some poetic conventions that most people don't like anymore (like use of personified abstractions or "poetic" diction)--they sound a lot more like prose than their predecessors did.

Another thing I recommend is buying a slim collection of poems from some particular poet, once you've found you like them, and carrying it around with you during your day. When you have a good moment for it, in a nice place, just sit down and read a poem and turn it over in your mind for a while. Just sit on a bench with a pretty view, have a cigarette, and read some nice verse. That's what poetry is good for--being at-hand when you want something good to think about.

Not all poetry is like that. Certainly not epic poetry. But I don't recommend jumping straight into that.

to those of you who've ignored the evidently unrelated OP pic, thanks for the help.

>>6422346
very, very helpful. I'll check out the romantics then; I do have a soft spot for the romantic ideology in general, and I'd definitely be able to make sense of the supposedly prosaic writing.

>Yeats
Heh, I read "The Second Coming" today (can't remember why tbh, but it was on a whim), and although I have no idea what Yeats is doing on a strictly poetic level, I certainly think the themes (especially his bleak, quazi post-Hegelian view of history) present are very interesting.

>>6422303
that's definitely helpful, anon. thanks bae.

>>6422161
i'll defintely dl this. looks very promising.

>>6421244
hmm, i'm a bit scared to jump into epic poetry before understanding smaller works of verse. why do you suggest that?

>>6421240
>read it out loud
>repeat
>repeat
>repeat until you understand it 100%
>read a analysis of the poem
>realize your interpretation of it was way off
>pretend you understood it w/o any help
>??????
>profit

>>6422786
>reading out loud

>>6422225

>>6421240
Love words

>>6422234
>you can't dislike a work of art unless you have objectively made a better one yourself

>>6423832
>not reading out loud

how can you truly appreciate words without speaking them?