How do you get into reading poetry?

How do you get into reading poetry?

Take a guess it starts with a Greek

Which one?

Homer

Youre a failure

Honestly just find a poet that you like, buy a copy of his selected works, and start reading them before bed every night. I recommend you try T.S. Eliot.

is really bad advise. The older and more translated the poetry is the less potent it will be.

Start with more accessible and move to less accessible. Pic related is a great starting point.

Hey bruh. I can help you out with some questions

Poetry is very traditonal and tends to follow rules per say. English poetry is derived from telling a story in a song

It tends to follow a rymthmic meter such as iambic, which means a unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable. A poem needs to have rhythm, you can do this without a meter but typically expect to see things written in a meter

Poetry as of lately decided to throw rhythm out the window and become preachy garbage, avoid these at the start

A poem tends to be a combination of a nice rhythmic song and saying something, making a rhetoric through other literary devices. Allusions are very common in poems, especially biblical and ancient Greek. Poems like Ezra pound and T.S. Eliot are more focused on rhetoric and are complex flexes of literary ability. Poets like John Keats and William Wordsworth tend to focus on a nice rhythm. Start on these ones

If someone is particularly important and wrote apt poetry they tend to be reverred. Such as w.b. yeats, a decent poet but an essential part of irish history at a pivotal time and capturing it in his poetry, part of a cultural revival kind of

hahahahaha could you be more illiterate

Also as well. This is only applicable to English poetry. To understand meter, which I think is the first step read john Milton. Quite boring but tells narratives in a strict iambic meter

Also, Don't be worried about not being in university studying literature. I've never stepped foot in a university and work as a labourer

I've just had a cunt of a day at work and wanted to help out a person interested in poetry. I've got heaps of shit to do. Wrote that very quick. Fuck off, eat a dick you stupid cunt

OP don't listen to this. there is absolutely no substitute for being at a great university studying what you want to study. read about all the great artists in all the creative fields - and frankly all those scientific, as well - either they went to a great uni or they had a very serious salon-type deal, and it is extremely unlikely that you can achieve the latter in this day and age. as nice as it is to think that you can be an autodidact, there is absolutely no substitute for sitting down in a room for several hours each week with other people who are smarter than you and trying collaboratively to dissect the great works. the trope of the independent genius scholar has been extinguished, if it ever seriously existed.

Are the poems of the Greeks really the best ways? Would I have to read classic Asian literature for haiku?

Paying through the ass for a sub par education where you are in class with rich brats and diversity admissions isnt a great idea

no of course not. although it's eventually nice to read the classics - especially dante, homer, etc. - in order to understand the references and allusions that later poems make, you can still get a great deal from contemporary poetry without this background. A complete n00b can read Leaves of Grass, Kaddish, Ash Wednesday, or any other great recent poetry and will get more than enough out of it. these works have the potential to be life-changing for almost anyone who is willing to take them seriously.

well, that goes without saying. but if you're not at the level where you can get paid to go to a world-class institution, you're better off working as a receptionist or vindow viper anyway ;)

That has nothing to do with poetry

Start with strictly English. Chaucer is where English poetry really took off, then Milton

What about haikus? I really enjoy them for some reason. Also, any person recommendations or am I safe just picking what catches my eye?

Haikus are a little hard to understand. They are appreciated more once you have a greater knowledge

To Anne Gregory is a nice poem by yeats . Give it a read. Combining nice aspects of rhythm, a general compliment in a rather ordinary poetic way given in a typical irish manner

If you like haiku read Basho