Where to start with poetry?

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Anonymous Tue May 15 03:16:47 2018 No.11155369 [Reply] [Original]

Where to start with poetry?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 03:18:06 2018 No.11155372 >>11155369 /lit/ wiki

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 03:19:10 2018 No.11155376 >>11155369 in a book

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 03:39:16 2018 No.11155402 >>11155369 Homer, then Eliot's The Waste Land, then Pound's Cantos, and then back to John Keats. Re-read Homer. Voila.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 03:41:12 2018 No.11155406 >>11155402 retard

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 03:51:07 2018 No.11155422 Do fun stuff! Like contemporary poets, Dobyns, William Matthews, and so forth.

Anonymous Tue May 15 05:38:43 2018 No.11155725

>>11155369
Start with The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, then read The Darkling Thrush and The Second Coming, then read the most well known poems of the Romantics (Ode on a Grecian Urn/to a Nightingale, Ozymandias, Kubla Khan, The Tyger, Daffodils). From there you can keep going backwards, or you can read more poems similar to the ones you liked best. Most of these poems are very accessible and at least one of them should appeal to you. Don't start with something like Sailing to Byzantium which may only seem "pretty good" because the greatness isn't immediately accessible.

>>11155402
don't listen to this dumbass

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 05:44:05 2018 No.11155738 >all this anglo read homer, read catullus, read vergillius, then read your national romanticist, then realists, then symbolists etc don't bother with contemporary poetry I'm sure you can handle it.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 05:44:56 2018 No.11155743 >>11155369 asking strangers online

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 05:48:28 2018 No.11155750 >>11155369 Rupi Kaur

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 05:54:10 2018 No.11155762 >>11155725 Why the fuck should he start with a modernist poem

Anonymous Tue May 15 06:06:52 2018 No.11155801

>>11155762
Because Eliot is closer to us in sensibility than are the ancients, because it's modern and colloquial but still rhymes which is what plebs think poetry is, because it's easy to read. Your entry into poetry should not be a translation. It also shouldn't be epic poetry, so I wouldn't recommend Milton either. One should start with lyric poetry that's great on a word level.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:13:17 2018 No.11155820 File: 53 KB, 640x480, The Oxford Library of English Poetry.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11155369 Never really read any poetry but bought this. Is it a good start?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:14:26 2018 No.11155822 >>11155801 >Because Eliot is closer to us in sensibility than are the ancients speak for yourself depressive reactionary

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:19:09 2018 No.11155839 You don't. Poetry sucks and poets are pretentious cunts.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:28:52 2018 No.11155860 >>11155822 I'm sure you love reading your Lattimore translation of Homer (it's so accurate!) and speculating on the polysemy of the word Logos, but you can't deny that you're a modern. We all are. There is no escaping it.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:30:07 2018 No.11155863 >>11155369 Mao Tse-Tung's poetry

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:34:28 2018 No.11155876 >>11155860 I thought Fitzgerald was the tedious yet accurate translation?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:34:50 2018 No.11155877 pale fire

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:35:32 2018 No.11155882 >>11155860 Pretty sure we're postmoderns senpai

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 06:36:51 2018 No.11155888 >>11155406 >>11155725 I'm legit naming the things I'm using for an essay, fucking baited faggots. TROLOLOLOL

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 07:29:22 2018 No.11156030 >>11155369 Honestly start with the Romantics, the themes are pretty universal, language is reasonably accessible, and they're often short so you won't be put off as a newcomer

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 07:39:24 2018 No.11156059 >>11155369 start with modern poetry and work backwards.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 08:17:28 2018 No.11156208 >>11155369 Start with Nael's "The Tiger". And don't read anything beyond that, since it is objectively the pinnacle of poetry.

Anonymous Tue May 15 08:26:47 2018 No.11156241

>>11155369

The best thing is to try as many different poets as you can - just one or two poems by each - and when you find something you like, read more by that author. So just get hold of a decent compendium as a starting-point, or else walk into a library and pick up poetry books at random.

As far as general trends of "what should be read earlier as opposed to later", I would personally recommend you start with stricter metrical and rhymed verse because that trains your ear for the basic patterns. Remember modern 'free verse' came about because people had been writing and reading verse in stricter forms for hundreds of years - it's very different if you try to come to it "cold". Also, you should try to learn poetry by heart, and poetry in strict forms is MUCH easier to memorize.

Here's a few random poems that are easy to learn by heart:

>'Into My Heart An Air That Kills', A.E.Houseman
>'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening', Robert Frost
>'In My Craft Or Sullen Art', Dylan Thomas
>'If', Rudyard Kipling
>'As Imperceptibly As Grief', Emily Dickinson
>'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer', John Keats
>'Ozymandius', Percy Shelley
>'Life, Friends, Is Boring' - John Berryman
>The Fall Of Rome, W.H.Auden
>Any of the good sonnets, doesn't have to have a summer day in it - W.Shakespeare

All of these are pretty short. 'If' is the longest but it's rock-solid in rhyme & meter so it's easy anyway.

Anonymous Tue May 15 08:27:46 2018 No.11156244

>>11155369
TEH GREEKS
Hesiod
Homer
Sappho
Theocritus

THE ROMANOS
Horace
Virgil

CHINKS
Li Po
Classic of Poetry
Basho

TEH JOOS
Book of Job
Song of Songs
Ecclesiastes
Psalms

THE MOHAMMEDANS
Rumi
Saadi
Ferdowsi
Hafez

MEDIEVAL SHIT
Beowulf
Pearl Poet
Boccaccio
Petrarch
Dante
Chaucer

RENE AISSANCE
Shakespeare
Milton
Donne
St John of Cross

ENLIGHTENED SHIT
Dryden
Pope
Goethe

ROMANTICS AND TRANSCENDENTALS
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Poe
Pushkin
Shelley
Keats
Byron
Whitman
Dickinson

DEGENERATES
Leopardi
Baudelaire
Rimbaud
Rilke

STICK UP ME ARSE
Tennyson
Hardy
Browning
Houseman
Christiana Rossetti
Tagore

MODERN DEGENERATES
Yeats
Eliot
Bunting
Williams
Pessoa
Lorca

RECENT FAGGORTS
Neruda
Dylan Thomas
Auden
Larkin
Frost
Bishop
Plath
Milosz
Celan
Farrokhzad

Anonymous Tue May 15 08:29:25 2018 No.11156252

>>11155822
No, he's right. You're removed by thousands of years of cultures, languages, history, world circumstances, and philosophy. Even if you studied it your entire life you will never grasp it beyond the surface and systematically arrayed details. You're not of the time -- and all that implies.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 08:32:25 2018 No.11156262 Friends reminder to stop underrating Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 08:36:08 2018 No.11156276 >>11155369 That is my least favorite Wojak of all time. If I ever see that Wojak on this board again I will scream.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 08:39:58 2018 No.11156289 >>11156276 Who gives a fuck?

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 08:41:42 2018 No.11156299 >>11156289 You do apparently. No one was talking to you and you were so interested you had to engage.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 08:47:54 2018 No.11156320 File: 8 KB, 260x194, mad.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11156289 He's (>>11156299) got you there, dude.

Anonymous Tue May 15 13:47:01 2018 No.11157579
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>>11155369
Try pic related.

>>11155877
Not a bad call.

>>11156244
lol. I like your list. Off the top of my head, one glaring omission is Ovid. Would probably add Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens under modernist poetry as well. And John Ashbery under recent poets.

Anonymous Tue May 15 14:01:11 2018 No.11157623

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGn1Ilx_3o4 i stumbled across these not long ago and read the bio how its for 11-14 yr olds. is it true that kids in some places actually get to learn this stuff at that age?
i'll never understand why my parents let me rot in my school

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 14:04:51 2018 No.11157636 >>11155888 Cringe

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 14:08:07 2018 No.11157649 >>11157579 Shit, forgot about Ovid and Stevens. Pound and Ashbery I don't rate all that much but they're obviously both very important.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 14:09:13 2018 No.11157654 >>11156299 You were talking to me.

Anonymous Tue May 15 14:21:02 2018 No.11157693
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>>11155750
I overheard a conversation between two people about this. One said the other was ''invalidating the trauma she (Kaur) experienced in her life'' by (correctly) saying that her poetry was shit.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 14:24:25 2018 No.11157713 Recommended in another thread, and legit a great read. "Why Poetry?" - Matthew Zapruder

Anonymous Tue May 15 15:10:07 2018 No.11157979
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>>11155369
Pierre Joris' compendium of world poetry wouldn't be terrible (fabulous translator, good poet himself.)

>>11155750
>Rupi Kaur
To get a taste of what's churning in the sewers under our feet, not a terrible negative example

>>11156241
>many different poets
Individual poem (or book) recommednations are helpful for initiates to feel out where their instincts want them to go to find their muses. On that note: Yeat's THE TOWER

>>11156244
>Medieval shiiiet
Poetic Edda, Heliand, Kalevala
>Recent fughats
Robinson Jeffers, Donald Patterson, Hayden Carruth,

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 15:28:13 2018 No.11158064 >>11156244 >reading nonwhites dropped

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 15:30:14 2018 No.11158076 >>11157693 >"the trauma" >I sucked 14 chav dicks of off tinder and none of them stuck around!

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 15:42:16 2018 No.11158152 >>11155369 With stuff written in a language you can understand

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 15:44:22 2018 No.11158167 >>11157979 >fabulous translator, Pro tip. It ceases to be poetry the moment something is translated. World poetry is pseudo.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 15:46:00 2018 No.11158178 >>11155369 Ezra pound and Eliot.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 15:56:17 2018 No.11158234 Bob Dylan

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 17:32:14 2018 No.11158776 For >contemporaries, I have enjoyed Lawrence Raab. He has a collection I liked called "Mistaking Each Other For Ghosts" but "other children" is good too.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 17:51:46 2018 No.11158884 >>11158167 - Avoid poetry in translation until you're wise. - How will I know when I am wise, master? - When you stop wanting to read poetry in translation.

Anonymous Tue May 15 18:03:47 2018 No.11158943

>>11155369
I'll give you the best answer in this thread.
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times.
Its about 500 contemporary poems with little snippets about the lives of the authors and what some of them meant, grouped into themes. It is really masterfully done, the way they are put together from all over the world makes them especially poignant. After that, take your favorite poems from that book and read the other works of the same poet.

Also Bukowski.

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 18:40:14 2018 No.11159119 >>11156276 >t. onions boy

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 19:00:40 2018 No.11159230 >>11156208 yes

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 19:03:55 2018 No.11159252 >>11158178 >>11158234 desolation row

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 19:07:20 2018 No.11159272 >>11155888 oh... cool grimace

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 19:29:42 2018 No.11159388 >>11156244 >Leopardi >degenerate fucking idiot

>>	Anonymous Tue May 15 21:59:27 2018 No.11160143 >>11159388 But he was, in spirit.

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 02:11:32 2018 No.11161256 so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water I seriously want to fucking kill myself.

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 03:11:02 2018 No.11161469 >>11155369 i started with dr seuss

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 04:13:14 2018 No.11161677 >>11155369 You start with the Greeks, fucking dumbass.

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 04:54:57 2018 No.11161786 >>11155369 Don't even bother with these faggots, OP Just read Whitman, roll a joint and read it aloud, you'll get it.

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 08:53:44 2018 No.11162240 >>11159230 YES

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 10:14:32 2018 No.11162498 >>11155369 Just be yourself bro!

>>	Anonymous Wed May 16 10:16:29 2018 No.11162505 Why didn't Charles Bukowksi just move out?

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