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/lit/ - Literature


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7514448 No.7514448 [Reply] [Original]

How do I into poetry?

Recently became quite attracted to the idea of poetry. I've leafed through some of Ezra Pound's ABC and read a little bit of Eliot. I'm planning on doing it properly though, going to read:

The Iliad
The Odyssey
Theogony
Works and Days
Metamorphoses
The Aeneid
Divine Comedy
The Canterbury Tales
The Elder Edda
The Prose Edda
Beowulf
The Nibelungenlied

I do want to read most of those for their own sake, but would that be a good list to start with?

>> No.7514454

Learn meter and poetic forms/structures.

>> No.7514519

>>7514454
Any good books for that?

>> No.7514527

Nigga, do you want lyric or epic poetry? All the stuff you posted is epic, not lyric.

http://pastebin.com/cBZknniE

>> No.7514533

Uh Ancient Greek music always had lyrics you retard, it wasn't until like the 17th cnetuyr that music without lyrics was invented

>> No.7514535

>>7514519
I have John Hollander's Rhymes Reason. Recommended by Harold Bloom. It is short, and pretty good.

>> No.7514558

>>7514533
It's a meme you dip

>> No.7514560

>>7514527
>http://pastebin.com/cBZknniE
Cheers pham.

>> No.7514566

>>7514558
>7514558
It's a factually incorrect meme.

>> No.7514579

>>7514448
So for you've only gotten bad advice. Unless you want to learn about poetic forms/structures...

If you want to read poetry, just dive into it. You don't have to read chronologically. To read a book just because it's old (it seems like that is your criterion) is bullshit.

That being said, Dante (and probably the rest, which I haven't read, are very good to say the least).

If you are just starting, I would recommend: Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Octavio Paz, John Donne, Shakespeare, Lewis Caroll, Emily Dickinson. These are all more accessible than your classics.

I have a feeling that many people (especially c/lit/s) start with a scholarly translation of the oldest poem they can find, with more footnotes than poetry (so as not to miss a thing), yet their experience is ruined...

Again, just dive into it.

>> No.7514584

>>7514579
So far you've only gotten...*

>> No.7514610

If English is your first language start with those: Milton, Browning, Keats, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Pound, and so on and so forth. Learn Latin and Homeric Greek down the line. Real talk, Homer's Lyrics was straight fire.

>> No.7514623

>>7514610
Favorite Longfellow?
Pound?
Keats and Browning?
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Wallace Stevens

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

>> No.7514737

>>7514566
You're so, incredibly, stupid.

>> No.7514756

>>7514579
>implying that understanding meter, form, historical context and allusions won't increase your enjoyment of poetry.

It only takes a few hours of reading to understand meter and form.

Your advice is high school tier, desu.

>> No.7514778

>>7514623
Can't copypaste on phone but of Browning so far Porphyria's Lover and Andrea del Sarto, Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Cantos with Pound. I'm just getting into poetry myself but am pretty determined to learn Latin after reading a translation of Metamorphoses, also Edmun Burke and Alexander Pope are fantastic.

>> No.7515173

>>7514756
This. Context can be very useful. See - Shakespeare's parody of Petrarca.

>> No.7516663

>>7514756
I know it will. I never said otherwise. What I'm saying, however, is that it is not primary. Reading poetry is primary.

>> No.7516667

>>7514756
Not-OP here: But Andrea, your advice is 4chan-tier. Now which of the two should I choose?
>>7514579

>> No.7516788
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7516788

>>7514579
>read for fun not to understand poetry in its every aspect
>this is why /lit/ is pleb and anything beyond this shit is considered e/lit/ist