/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3838397]

Why do contemporary authors fill their books with arcane bullshit?

All these allusions to dialectics, thermodynamics, Platonism, etc. just seems masturbatory. Or maybe I'm just being uncouth. I don't know.

[Anonymous No.3839124]

T.S. Eliot answered this ~100 years ago in his essay on The Metaphysical Poets:

"It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning."

[Anonymous No.3839156]

I miss when poetry was a kind of literary Mastermind.

>To read the poem sensibly one has to know Heraclitus, the history of Mexico, Plutarch, geography, ornithology, Pound's Cantos, Albrecht Durer's diary, archaeology, Mayan culture, Marco Polo, Rimbaud, Keats, the Bible, Shakespeare, French, and Italian. It also helps to know the geological theories of Frank Taylor and Alfred Wegener, and the subject of cybernetics as it was understood in 1949.

[Anonymous No.3839159]

>>3838397

Because it's fun.