/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1378741]

I was wondering, what's /lit/'s opinion on poetry?

Pic related. A young Robert Frost, my favorite poet.

[Anonymous No.1378742]

>>1378741
I was wondering, what's /g/'s opinion on computers?

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378746]

Some say the world will end in fire
some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
to say that for destruction ice
is also great
and would suffice.


I like Frost too. E.E. Cummings is one of my favorites, along with Ted Hughes.

[Anonymous No.1378748]

I think I know what OP means. Most topics here are about novels and non-fiction, rarely poetry.
Personally, I love it. Writing poetry is the greatest escape from the stress of real life I know.

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378751]

>>1378742
I've seen some hate for poetry on /lit/ man. Prose/poetry stuff isn't on the same level as the /v/ console shit and maybe /g/ has the epic mac/PC goin on, I dunno, don't lurk those boards, but it's almost kind of a fair question.

[Anonymous No.1378753]

>>1378746
>E.E. Cummings

e.e. Cummings
He had his name put legally into lower case and signed all his poetry this way. FYI

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378764]

>>1378753
>my favorite poet
>implying I didn't know this already and just arbitrarily capitalize sometimes because it's habit to capitalize names
>implying just because he's my favorite I should respect it when I don't give a damn, I loved his poems but his name was Edward Estlin Cummings, that's not e.e., that's E.E.
>implying I don't do it just to watch some pedantic fuck like you mention it as if you're hot shit.

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378772]

>>1378753

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378775]

>>1378764

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378777]

>>1378775

[Anonymous No.1378778]

I love Dorothy Parker.

Threnody is my favorite Poem.
Lilacs blossom just as sweet
Now my heart is shattered.
If I bowled it down the street,
Who's to say it mattered?
If there's one that rode away
What would I be missing?
Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.

Eyes that watch the morning star
Seem a little brighter;
Arms held out to darkness are
Usually whiter.
Shall I bar the strolling guest,
Bind my brow with willow,
When, they say, the empty breast
Is the softer pillow?

That a heart falls tinkling down,
Never think it ceases.
Every likely lad in town
Gathers up the pieces.
If there's one gone whistling by
Would I let it grieve me?
Let him wonder if I lie;
Let him half believe me.

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378779]

>>1378777

[Anonymous No.1378781]

I'm a girl of course.

>>1378778
My second Favorite poem by Dorothy Parker is

Fair Weather.

[Anonymous No.1378782]

This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.

Beautiful.

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378783]

Just Once

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.

[Anonymous No.1378785]

>>1378777
Capslock is cruise control for cool.

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378786]

>>1378783
Oh yeah that's Anne Sexton forgot to add that.

[Anonymous No.1378793]

he living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.

The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

(In a Disused Graveyard - Robert Frost)

[Koroviev !!bFY778Jwu68 No.1378824]

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
we people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
and he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich-- yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

[Anonymous No.1378836]

Robert Frost is genius. Here's my favorite poem by him:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening


Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

[Anonymous No.1378867]

>>1378836
Yes yes yes awesome poem.

And don't forget:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

[Anonymous No.1378909]

Mark how our shadow, mark Movits mon fre're
one small darkness encloses
How gold and purple in that shovel there
to rags and rubbish disposes
Charon beckons from tumultuous waves
then trice this ancient digger of graves
for thee ne'er grapeskin shall glister
wherefore my Movits come help me to raise
a gravestone over our sister
Even desirous and modest abode
under the sighing branches
where time and death, a marriage forebode
'twixt beauty and ugliness ashes
To thee ne'er jealousy findeth her way
nor happiness footstep, swift to stray

filleth amid these barrows
e'en enmity armed, as thou seest this day
piously breaketh her arrow
The little bell echoes the great bells groan
robed in the door the precentor
noisome with quiristers prayerful moan
blesses those, who enter
The way to this templed city of tombs
climbs amid roses yellowing blooms
fragments of mouldering biers
till black-clad each mourner, his station assumes
bows there deeply in tears

[Anonymous No.1379234]

moar

[Anonymous No.1379240]

Fuck you guys, Slavic Existentialism FTW:

They scare me by saying
There's a screw loose in my head

They scare me more by saying
They'll bury me
In a box with the screws loose

They scare me but little do they realise
That my loose screws
Scare them

The happy crazy from our street
Boasts to me

[Anonymous No.1379264]

Philip Larkin is my favorite poet.

Church Going - Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
(Continued)

[Anonymous No.1379270]

(continued) >>1379264

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

[Anonymous No.1379273]

Or, for a more easily digestible piece by Larkin, why not give his poem 'This Be The Verse' a quick read.

This Be The Verse - Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

[Anonymous No.1379285]

Poetry can suck a billion dicks.

[Anonymous No.1379288]

>>1379273
>>1379270
>>1379264
Wow, brilliant poems. Thanks for posting. I'll have to read more of this Philip Larkin guy.

I don't read much poetry, but I like Yeats a lot.

Sailing to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--- Those dying generations --- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shalll never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

[Anonymous No.1379289]

>>1379286
Dali was surrealism. And now it's dead.

[Anonymous No.1379286]

>>1379285
Oldest form of art, strangely still alive & kicking in ALL groups (rap niggers, slamfags, writers), influenced or kickstarted whole cultural movements (hi surrealism)

[Anonymous No.1379290]

>>1379288
Maud is such a bitch

[Anonymous No.1379293]

>>1379285
>>1379286
>>1379289
This is trolling. Don't respond.

[Anonymous No.1379303]

>>1379293
fuck you, I respond to trolls if I want to, and I happen to live it because sometimes failtrolls are extremely obvious due to: unexploitable topics, poor arguments, absent provocation, difficult targets (me)

[Anonymous No.1379307]

>>1379288
Larkin fan, here. I also love Yeats, and Sailing to Byzantium is a brilliant piece concerning the journey of life.
I also love Dylan Thomas, who was very obviously influenced by W.B. Yeats. It's really the entire mid-20th century English/Irish poetry that really does it for me. That was just a large group of brilliant brilliant men and women revitalizing an old art-form in ways new and exciting.

[Anonymous No.1379306]

>>1379290
What did Maud do? I don't know all that much about Yeats's life apart from his superstition etc.

[Anonymous No.1379310]

>>1379307
Some of my other favorites of the era are Stevie Smith, Patrick Kavanagh, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Craig Raine, W.H. Auden, Carol Ann Duffy, and the aforementioned Ted Hughes.
Anybody else fans of these brilliant poets?

[Anonymous No.1379452]

even moar