i love poetry. i think its the greatest artform, the one that comes closest to capturing the human condition while also being aesthetically pleasing by itself. i love it so much that i try to get my friends and family to read it too, because theres a poet for every walk of life to fall in love with for one reason or another, whether it be Bukowski or Shakespeare or Yeats. I dont care if the poet is shit or one of the greats, i just want them to get the same joy and see the same beauty from it as i do.
My question is: is this a good thing, or just really pretentious and self-righteous? Should i go around recommending bad writers, or forget about the academic elitism and introduce them to anyone they might relate to? These people dont read at all so its not like its hurting them anyway right?
>whether it be Bukoswki Shakespeare or Yeats
>I don't care if the poet is shit or one of the greats
Poetry
>>7980861
He's like a shitty bookstore employee who just has to sell something, anything, to every fucking idiot.
you love poetry because the one time you ever felt part of a group was among poets. they validated your self-image for perhaps half an hour and your brain took an imprint on this.
you could just as well have been out shooting squirrels with a different group of people, and you'd now be saying "I love guns. i think hunting is the greatest artform, the one that comes closed to capturing the human condition while also being aesthetically pleasing by itself."
the sad part is, trapped inside this imprint, it's going to take you years to work out that poetry is just a thing. it's not THE thing. there are thousands of things out there, and poetry is just the thing you fall into.
>>7980861
I love poetry too for the same reasons. It is the queen of the arts.
But I don't push it onto people because, well, didacticism doesn't work. Like in school, pushing something onto people will only make them resent it.
If the topic comes up I will talk about poetry, and if people are interested I might recommend something. But it can't be forced on people.
Also: never recommend bad writers. There are countless poets who have both popular and academic appeal (Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Eliot...)
