/lit/, I've never really read much poetry but I'd like to start. Where should I begin?
>>5581421
poe, frost, and shakespeare are great starts for a novice. maybe byron, keats, and whitman after.
>>5581446
>Shakespeare
>Great start for a novice
Oh boy.
>>5581421
You're in luck and you've come to the right place. There one or a couple of douches on /lit/ who love to post their poetry all day every day.
Poetry is dead and you shouldn't want to get into it at all, but I won't stop you.
>>5581452
Why would it matter if it's dead? Just because modern poetry isn't important in comparison to older poetry doesn't mean it's useless.
Should no one read the Iliad, The Odyssey, or Paradise Lost because "Poetry is dead"?
Does artistic value have an expiration date that determines whether or not one should explore a medium?
>>5581451
well, why not?
>>5581452
>No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty.
>>5581421
A. E. Housman
>reading poetry
fuckin' plebs.
>>5581421
A great introduction is The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry
>>5581615
please be joking
>>5581671
the novel is the superior literary form.
poetry is outmoded and useless.
kill yourself.
>>5581421
Seamus Heaney
Philip Larkin
Sylvia Plath
Brecht
John Donne (if you want something old school)
Chinua Achebe
Walt Whitman
and my personal favourite, Coleridge.
>>5581680
>kill yourself.
That's right. You'll get those mean older posters to take you seriously even if you need to maymay them into total oblivion.
>>5581707
sarcasm, the last refuge of the rekt.
you're pathetic.
>>5581715
You think that you're the first poetry pleb who has written off the form because abstraction intimidates him?
You come at lit like a STEM kid you errant pleb.
>>5581421
Said before, and it's worth repeating, because reasons
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/5552355
>As far as reading poetry itself, don't limit yourself to one period or style. Read both online and offline poetry / literary journals (Conduit, Pank, Prairie Schooner, The New Megaphone, Hangman, etc., etc., etc. I could go on, etc.)
Chapbooks are as sexy as Collected works and anthologies.
So yeah, I'd go to a library, check out classic shit, anthologies, and poetry/literary journals/reviews
If you find a poet or poets that really excite you, then look for their books and continue reading, and so on and so forth
>>5581721
i'm sorry your favorite pet medium is shit.
i'm also sorry that i make more money than you by being a "stem kid", but we can't all sit around jerking ourselves off to archaic, shitty mediums like you do.
>>5581763
>I have trouble with lateral thinking and creative abstraction and I'm super insecure over it
Of course you are legitimately STEM. How could you not be? You're too much of a perfect encapsulation of the stereotypical ineptitude that we regularly see from them on this board to be anything otherwise, lol.
You might not be a reader but at least you're trying. And you know what? That is something that no one can ever take away from you.
>>5581778
your condescension doesn't make poetry any better, bud.
it's funny how you claim i encapsulate a stereotype while you're the embodiment of pretentious hipster bullshit.
you can be a condescending fuckwit all you want, but that won't make your poetry jams any less retarded.
>>5581785
>he won't stop trying
Bless his little heart. I see my words kept the fire stoked.
You try as hard as you can to work with your limitations and you never let up. No one can take that much away from you my son.
>>5581680
Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.
Poetry is really hard to do right so it's no wonder it's become unfashionable. Poetry isn't just random lineation or couplets, you need to have an ear for syllables, rhythm, and be economic with your language. It's a disciplined form, and no one is bothered to learn it, or people want to 'subvert the conventions' (without learning them first)
It takes more talent to write a 'leaves of grass' or 'paradise lost' than it takes to make a maximalist word salad tome like IJ.
Poetry: 1
Novels: 0
>>5581825
and to wrote something like 'divine comedy' needed more talent that both 'leaves...' and 'paradise lost', also to write 'paradise lost' needed more talent than to write 'leaves...'
guess why
i personally think leaves are ramblings which whitman being charismatic could make others read. can you imagine his poetry got popular if it had been discovered after his death as dickinson's? i cannot
(though i don't especially appreciate dickinson either)
>>5581825
What's that quote? "All novelists are failed poets?" Not really true IMO but conveys the finer considerations generally applied to verse in a humorous way.
try the sticky. ignore the chart look at the words
>>5581825
attitude toward poetry is the real /lit/mus test that separates the new reader plebs from the actual literati. don't bother trying to reason with him he's not gonna make it.
poetry blows, and all the fags in here saying it doesn't are lying through their teeth in an attempt to appear intelligent.
you're not going to find an easy way to get into a subject. look at a whole bunch of different poetry (the most celebrated authors usually have the most books on them in big groupings at the library...) and see if something clicks. then learn until you think you've learned everything and then learn some more
>>5581451
I think he is. He's not linguistically impenetrable, but he's so fucking good that he could get a novice really enthused with poetry. That he's great for a novice doesn't mean he's not great for more advanced readers too
>>5581421
William Carlos Williams
Allen Ginsberg
Bukowski
TS Eliot
John Donne
Emily Dickinson
Milton
These are all fairly basic introductions.
>>5581460
Or Metamorphoses
Or The Aeneid
Or The Divine Comedy
Or Patterson
Or Don Juan
Or Georgics
Or Pale Fire
Or fuck it...
>>5584012
>lying through their teeth in an attempt to appear intelligent.
pleb denial levels through the roof. /lit/ is a shit board and you are still too shit to even post here.
that is how unbelievably shit you are.
>>5586122
>Or Georgics
Oh God please yes, and take the Eclogues while your at it.
>>5586118
> English only
> Proposes Ginsberg & Bukowski as an introduction
>>5586147
On his defense, poetry is read best on the language it was originally written. There are several great translations out there, but they all lose something along the way, more so than in a novel
>>5586126
Not even that guy but your buttmad is hilarious.
>>5586368
you're anonymous it doesn't matter if you're just as pleb as he is no one will ever know. you don't need to subtly save face like this.
>>5586384
>he thinks that liking poetry makes him patrish
kek
>>5586396
summerfriend pls
>>5581421
Not OP, but I came here to make essentially the same thread, so I'll piggy on this one.
How does one find poetry that speaks to them? I mean, as a culture, the average person is pretty well exposed to film/TV, prose, and music, as there exist very accessible and popular forms of this supported by large industries. So, it's very easy to find works in these mediums one would like. You know you like this movie, and you hear this one is similar, and you watch that, too.
Poetry seems to be something that doesn't have much of a popular-media aspect (aside from greeting cards and jingles), so, how does one who is uninitiated go on about finding what they like? I see people have suggested famous poets here, and I'll check them out, but how do find ways to come across stuff that is "up your alley"? I mean, you never see someone ask "how do I get into music, what artists are good," and then get a standard list of "check out The Beatles, Dylan, Nirvana, and then go from there."
Also, how do I read poetry critically, and determine what gives a poem its qualities, what makes it good or bad, and intellectualize what I like about it instead of just having vague impressions? Grade school never taught us anything beyond the basic tools of looking for uses of metaphors and allegories and symbolism and stuff. I mean, it's not just the word denotations that affect meaning in poetry, but which words are used and how. How do I figure out what a poet is using word sounds to create meaning, or word order, and all this other stuff that'd go over my head? Sometimes I think, "I like this poem, but I don't know why, and I have no idea what it even means." What's the next step after that?
>>5586924
Also, what do you "do" with poetry?
I mean, with music (especially pop/rock), you tend to buy or download albums and sort of learn the songs so that you get to the point where you are so familiar, you know the lyrics or can anticipate what "part" comes next, even if you don't have the musical knowledge to know what the music being played is. Music is easy to internalize this way.
With films and prose, the plots and themes sort of stick in your mind.
With poetry... I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Do I memorize it? Read it over and over again until I "get" it? I mean, if I spent some hours reading a bunch of poems, I would probably forget most of them by the time I was done. How do you "internalize" them? Or is it useless to catalog them the same way we seem to intuitively do with other media, with poetry being more of an "in the moment" thing?
>>5586938
>what do you "do" with poetry?
What the fuck man
What do you do with song lyrics? With narrative books? With expressions? With quotes, soliloquies, aphorisms?
start with le epic antisemitic poetry man
>>5587149
shouldn't you be posting pound?
