/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3414315]

Why are poets so frequently beta and uninteresting people? How can anyone take seriously the work of a person who seems to know very little about being alive (besides, perhaps, for a knowledge of literature)? For example, compare Dickinson or Eliot to Ginsberg or Whitman.

[Anonymous No.3414317]

If they have perspective and insight it doesn't matter where it came from.

[Anonymous No.3414325]

I'm not even sure with side of the to is supposed to be the uninteresting one

[Anonymous No.3414326]

We take them seriously because they wrote good literature, nothing else. Their personal lives don't mean much. But i don't know why they were mostly betas, sorry.

[Anonymous No.3414332]

yeah dude people who do what they have a passion for and put themselves on the line for the entire world to see are beta man, you must live a real exciting life compared to them ;)

[Anonymous No.3414334]

>writing good poetry typically requires serious time and concentration and thus often leads to isolation
>surprised this appears uninteresting

[Anonymous No.3414338]

>>3414315
>know very little about being alive
if their content or advice were the main attraction they'd probably be writing prose and not poetry

[Anonymous No.3414339]

Honestly if I was a mod I would ban the OP.

Literally the kind of person who shouldn't be on this board.

[Anonymous No.3414344]

>>3414325
Dickinson was a pathetic shut-in and Eliot's personality was summed up pretty well in Prufrock. Ginsberg lived wildly on the social fringes and soaked in a new vision for American life because of it. Whitman did the same, essentially, by being influenced by his experiences in various parts of the US. A better explanation is that the latter two seem as though they might actually have a pulse, unlike the former.

[Anonymous No.3414345]

>>3414325
>>3414325
Dickinson was a pathetic shut-in and Eliot's personality was summed up pretty well in Prufrock. Ginsberg lived wildly on the social fringes and soaked in a new vision for American life because of it. Whitman did the same, essentially, by being influenced by his experiences in various parts of the US. A better explanation is that the latter two seem as though they might actually have a pulse, unlike the former.

[Anonymous No.3414348]

>>3414344

>Dickinson was a pathetic shut-in and Eliot's personality was summed up pretty well in Prufrock. Ginsberg lived wildly on the social fringes and soaked in a new vision for American life because of it. Whitman did the same, essentially, by being influenced by his experiences in various parts of the US. A better explanation is that the latter two seem as though they might actually have a pulse, unlike the former.

Holy fuck you're slaying me, some kid on fucking /lit/ calling published and celebrated artists pathetic, my sides have been decimated.

[Anonymous No.3414352]

>>3414344
Oh you're a beat kiddie, that explains it

[Anonymous No.3414357]

>>3414348
>published and celebrated
Well, nice to know what you admire.

So are you actually claiming that, despite being a reclusive shut-in and generally meek, was somehow not pathetic as a person? I don't know you, but it's likely you would think someone you knew in your personal life who acted like this was pathetic, even if you did know they were a poet.

[Anonymous No.3414360]

>>3414352
Nope.

[Anonymous No.3414362]

Does it hurt, OP, that these people lived lives almost as boring as yours and still manage infinitely better than you in every single way?

[Anonymous No.3414361]

>>3414357
>thinking that a lawless sodomite isn't also pathetic

[Anonymous No.3414363]

>>3414357

Good lord you're a compassionless little fuckstain. I honestly recommend suicide.

[Anonymous No.3414370]

>>3414357
Calling someone pathetic implies that there is a better way to live life.

Are you ready to accept those implications?

[Anonymous No.3414373]

>>3414362

[Anonymous No.3414391]

Cut OP some slack. Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde have made similar remarks, about how second rate scholars/artists can be first rate men (in terms of the interest of the lives the lead) and vice versa.

OP to be honest I don't know. It's just a general trend I guess. Rarely does the life of the author exceed in interest the life of the characters he invents.

Most interesting, alpha people are too busy having fun to contemplate and write. You think Porfirio Rubirosa was too busy flying planes and playing polo and racing his cars and cheating on his wife to pick up the pen.

[Anonymous No.3414395]

Proust spent half his life dying in a room and provided one of the most interesting literary accounts ever

[Anonymous No.3414492]

>>3414363
He has to judge others by that moronic standard because he knows that he himself, by any other metric, can never aspire to anything but crushing mediocrity. If he did not insist the world was that way then he would not be able to justify his existence.

[Anonymous No.3414583]

OP, isn't it interesting to you that Eliot left Missouri for England on his own at a fairly young age and made a new life for himself there, befriending Pound (whose life is endlessly interesting) as well as many artists in the English arts community who he humbly learned from and then eventually attending Harvard in his late 20s with some of the greatest poetry (Prufrock and other Observations), submitting to the Advocate and quickly becoming a critic of the history of Literature, learning languages and later suffering a nervous mental breakdown where he and Valerie shut into a mental institution together?


And Emily Dickinson-- doesn't it interest you that she was a part of the flowering early Massachusetts American literature area where Emerson was walking by her house all the time? Does it not interest you that she kept to herself? Thus culturing the every idea that her soon-strongly trained wild imagination thought up? Her imagination must have been one of the most whimsical of all time in all of literature!
Look at how much she produced!

[Anonymous No.3414601]

>>3414357
>generally meek

You've got a problem with meekness, motherfucker?

[Anonymous No.3414630]

Do you dislike Dickinson's and Eliot's poetry? If so, I would (subjectively) call your taste horrible. If you like their poetry, yet consider their works invalid because they didn't lift and fuck mad bitches, then you are being inconsistent and arbitrarily denying yourself beautiful insights and appreciation. Either way you are dildos. This thread is dildos.

[Anonymous No.3414649]

Rimbaud lived like a fucking boss for a while.

[Anonymous No.3414655]

Ginsberg's life is very accessible. You can learn about him from reading Kerouac. You can learn about him from movies and you can learn about him from books about the beats-- and there are so damn many books about the Beats that are popular and often stocked in stores.
Ginsberg talked about his life constantly in his poetry. Later, he met Dylan and went on tour with him and others and variously met many people as well as protested things like the war and environmental threats.
Ginsberg has also variously become a pop icon, like it or not, and is admired by even passing poetry fans.

Whitman is sort of like this as well. He knew painters and many thinkers of his time. He was in the war (the medic part) and has an interesting family story much like Ginsberg's.
Whitman and Ginsy were both gay (we still assume Whitman was but... come on man.... he was) and this coupled with their outsider positions made them endlessly observable and conversation topics.

Dickinson and Eliot are very different from each other and very different from Ginsberg and Whitman but hey they are also alike in their own ways.
More people like to write about Eliot's poetry than who he hung out with or what his sex life was like or where he went and with what other writers. More people just plain read Emily and leave her poetry to fill in the bio part.

I love Lord Byron just as much as I love William Butler Yeats and I read about both of their lives one as much as the other.
Whoever you like, OP, that's who one likes to dig around for their life story.

[Anonymous No.3414679]

>>3414357
> despite being a reclusive shut-in and generally meek, was somehow not pathetic as a person

She wasn't; Eliot was though. Supposedly he didn't have any pictures of his wife up anywhere in his house, just embroidered, framed things of his poetry, which really disturbed Elizabeth Bishop.

[Anonymous No.3414689]

From all of your arguments I'm gathering that you're using a subjective social construct to support something you claim to be empirical fact.

[Anonymous No.3414721]

>>3414689
yeah.... that's what's happening, alright.
But Eliot's life. That was happening.
And like his life, people will find this thread uninteresting and we will all go about ours.

[Anonymous No.3414736]

>>3414357
Wait, so you are equating sitting inside as meek and going outside and living on the edge as living? Why the hell are you on /lit/? Why the hell do you read books? Your hobbies and actual interests are so out of tune it baffles me.

[Anonymous No.3414769]

>>3414679
Nigga are you even bothering to read the Wikipedia pages?

[Anonymous No.3415354]

because the kind of people who write are thoughtful people who have a feeling of differentness in them.
mallarme was socially awkward and boring. but his poetry is very beautiful.
keats probably never had sex in his short life.
but his poetry is very beautiful.
yeats was obsessed with a woman who had no romantic interest with him for like six years. it is thought that he kissed a woman for the first time (olivia shakespear) when he was thirty years old.
...but his poetry was very beautiful.

so whether you like it or not your feelings of superiority over the artists of the past kind of dont matter because of the locus of value in their legacy is in the art that they created. also dont say beta if you want to be taken seriously

[Anonymous No.3415394]

>>3414315
Why are the people that make this observation about poets themselves just as if not more "beta" than the poets upon whom they are pasting this false accusation, like Nietzsche for instance, great proponent of the instinctual traits in man over the civilised and cultured, and yet an exemplary version of the latter.

You're looking at the wrong list of poets. Few men live and drown in as much cunt as did Goethe(!), Heine, Byron, Baudelaire, very few French bards ever were in want of cunt, and there's more but I can't think of them right this moment.

Furthermore I think that underlying the amount of pussy poets get and have always got is the epicurean tendency of most majority. Poets will be epicureans rather than stoics. Historically true of Hindu and Islamic poetry, and the frequently bawdy versifiers of the middle ages in Europe - troubadours, minnesingers, meistersingers, and modern poetry. I don't know if this is changing.