Was he secretly the GOAT?

Was he secretly the GOAT?

>secretly

user there is nothing secret about it

He was the best friend of modernism, without him the movement wouldn't have been as good/successful as it was. He wasn't the best writer though. Good, but not the best.

>when academics try to write poetry

ME happy, night, night full of brightness;
Oh couch made happy by my long delectations;
How many words talked out with abundant candles;
Struggles when the lights were taken away;
Now with bared breasts she wrestled against me,
Tunic spread in delay;
And she then opening my eyelids fallen in sleep,
Her lips upon them; and it was her mouth saying:
Sluggard!

In how many varied embraces, our changing arms,
Her kisses, how many, lingering on my lips.
“Turn not Venus into a blinded motion,
Eyes are the guides of love,
Paris took Helen naked coming from the bed of Menelaus,
Endymion’s naked body, bright bait for Diana,”
—such at least is the story.

While our fates twine together, sate we our eyes with love;
For long night comes upon you
and a day when no day returns.
Let the gods lay chains upon us
so that no day shall unbind them.

Fool who would set a term to love’s madness,
For the sun shall drive with black horses,
earth shall bring wheat from barley,
The flood shall move toward the fountain
Ere love know moderations,
The fish shall swim in dry streams.

No, now while it may be, let not the fruit of life cease.

Dry wreaths drop their petals,
their stalks are woven in baskets,
To-day we take the great breath of lovers,
to-morrow fate shuts us in.

Though you give all your kisses
you give but a few.”

Nor can I shift my pains to other
Hers will I be dead,
If she confers such nights upon me,
long is my life, long in years,
If she give me many,
God am I for the time.

>Pound, Ezra. Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud.

LOQUITUR: En Betrans de Born.
Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.
Eccovi!
Judge ye!
Have I dug him up again?

The scene is his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur. “The
Leopard,” the device of Richard (Cœur de Lion).

I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

II

In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,
And the light’nings from black heav’n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.

III

Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!

IV

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And prys wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.

V

The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.

VI

Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle’s rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”

VII

And let the music of the swords make them crimson
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for always the thought “Peace”!

>secretly

Was he secretly the GOAT?

(Absolutely not)
Joyce called him out on not quite making it, he says something like Yeats is too old already but i dun remember exactly.

>something like Yeats is too old
I know what you're trying to refer to, it's not relevant.

He was definitely handsome

>tfw Verlaine, Poe, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and Baudelaire are my favorties
>tfw Nabokov shits on them relentlessly

>Poe
>Nabokov

Try to make sense next time

Yea. Joyce backed Yeats as the best poet of that time

not all. he was a good hypeman and talent scout but his own poetry lacks grace and aesthetic consicion

*not at all

He is occasionally very beautiful, but one gets the feeling that he is often biting off more than he can chew and that his knowledge is feigned and ostentatious.

Riprap By Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

looks like a literal goat

might as well smoke a corncob pipe at this point

Nabokov is nice to read, but don't actually listen to his opinions, he's an autist without the capacity for human emotion.

I sometimes think so, yeah.

Not the biggest fan of him, he comes across to me as overly casual in most of his work.

>overly casual

got the chance to meet gary once, i can tell you there is nothing casual about his poetry. dude basically invented deep ecology.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy his subject matter, I just don't always find the language he uses appealing. It's personal taste though, I still respect him.

did nabokov confound 'venerable' and 'veritable'?

Look up venerable

Not secretly. He is rather obviously the best poet of the 20th century who actually wrote in verse--I like Eliot and Pound, but they cannot compare to his fundamental poetic intuition, and the constant reinvention of his voice. Joyce, of course, is a greater poet; he just chose not to break up his lines.

I will add, however, that Pound is the greatest dramatic figure of Modernism. Even if what he wrote cannot compete with Yeats's or Joyce's (I think it may be superior to Eliot's, however), the tragic poetry that his impetuous and somewhat misguided life embodies. Among the greatest Modernists, I can identify most with Joyce (as pretentious as that is), but Pound leaves me most in awe (and terror and pity, etc.)

That first sentence is incomplete, and I don't know how I intended to complete it. I guess what I meant to say is that the tragic poetry his impetuous and somewhat misguided life embodies far outshines the others' lives.

Nabokov shits on everyone

stop talking

Why?

He didn't speak.

>Ezra Pound comes to fuck your bitch and be fascist
>the academic left has decided to totally forgo studying him because of his politics despite his central place in modernism

Oh sure, he is alright. He does a fine job. Nothing at all against him. That said, Jem Casey is really the only poet for me.

No, he was blatantly GOAT.

Damn right

I've read him in three different classes so far at my university

Why is there no epub of the Cantos?

I find it surprising that people don't see him as such in the Anglophone world.

Here in Brazil all the major poets - Mario Faustino, the Campos brothers, Gerardo Mello Mourão and I suspect even Bruno Tolentino - see Pound as having been quite clearly the major literary figure of the 20th century.

Americans have been blinded by ideology. Pound had an aestheti sense unequalled since the times of Donne and the Spanish dramatists, and he had the technique to transform it into great art.

''Era una contadinella
un po' tozza ma bella ch'aveva a braccio due tedeschi
e cantava cantava amore senz'aver bisogno d'andar in cielo. ''

There are bits and scraps by Pound which are worth dozens of poems.

He was quite the fan of HG Wells.

Post your Poundies.

>"The blossoms of the apricot
>blow from the east to the west,
>And I have tried to keep them from falling."

Yes, he was.

Another very important thing that many people tend to neglect is the fact that translations are also literary works. I have never heard an English poem of such delicate music as Pound's translation of that Confucian ode which he entitled 'Hid! Hid!'.

" Hid! Hid! " the fish-hawk saith,
by isle in Ho the fish-hawk saith:
" Dark and clear,
Dark and clear,
So shall be the prince's fere. "

Clear as the stream her modesty;
As neath dark boughs her secrecy,
reed against reed
tall on slight
as the stream moves left and right,
dark and clear,
dark and clear

To seek and not find
as a dream in his mind,
think how her robe should be,
distantly, to toss and turn,
to toss and turn.

High reed caught in ts'ai grass
so deep her secrecy;
lute sound in lute sound is caught,
touching, passing, left and right
Bang the gong of her delight.

Not to mention the whole of Cathay, Propertius, the Greek plays, The Seafarer...

>secretly

I'd say it's the opposite. He didn't try to hide that he was the most brilliant artist of all time—but he wasn't.

he was secretly the GORILLA BALLS

why do you think a fluff word like "veritable" is more likely than the meaningful epithet "venerable"?

Pound was a venerable fraud: widely respected, and fraudulent.

Don't worry, user. Nabokov just hates those poets because he knows far more than you do about every kind of literature

He was a fine poet, but I don't think he's even in the running for greatest of all time, even if we limit it to English-language poets. I'm not even sure I'd call him best of the 20th century.

Why is Nabokov so beloved around this place?

For God's sake, the man was just a second-rate Oscar Wilde. Not that he wasn't good - he certainly was - but I don't see why he should be considered an authority on any subject whatsoever which doesn't involve butterflies.

>For God's sake, the man was just a second-rate Oscar Wilde
Nigger what? Oscar Wilde is barely worth preserving, Nabokov was a genius.

He was the only author who could successfully make art funny.

no, but for reasons the majority of posters here won't understand.

yeats is great but he's incredibly overrated on this board, and always has been. he's exaggerated by juvenile readers of poetry. again, great poet, but not anywhere near the greatest of anything. read some arbitrary number of poets, like 20 poems from 300 different poets, then come back and read Yeats and if you've matured at all you'll understand what I mean. it's common to mention his "tin ear" and when you've experienced a lot of poetry it becomes noticeable in the way he wrote.

t. pretentious teen

>for reasons the majority of posters here won't understand

Try me, my pretentious friend.

>"tin ear"

Examples of this?

His offhand criticisms are intellectually equivalent to shitposts, but with the weight of authority behind them, which allows shitposters to feel justified in what they do.

He made jokes pretty.

>it's common to mention his "tin ear" and when you've experienced a lot of poetry it becomes noticeable in the way he wrote.
Agreed, but his sense of rhythm makes up for it, in my opinion.

What's a tin ear?

like limp dick but for your ears

>you're a big jew

I'm new to poetry, and I really like Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra I think is my favourite poem up until this point. I've finished reading "The Essential Ginsberg", his most known poems and journals, essays, notes etc.

Anyways, who should I look into now? Ginsberg talks quite a lot about Whitman, would he be good?

So did his later poems make any coherence? Considering he turned into a nut after being locked up.

Yes, read Whitman. And after you read Whitman, if you don't understand why Ginsberg and the beats are really really bad people for the bastardization they committed toward him, I want you to take a break and then reread Whitman until you get it.

Not really. If anything, they became more fragmented and incoherent, but I actually enjoy that, so, unlike a lot of people, I don't mind.

Leaves of Grass it is. I'm not sure they "bastardized" his style, but I guess I'll see for myself.

I agree with the other user, they bastardized it. There are only a few poets that did free verse well in my opinion.

not him, but since you're an illiterate retard i'll spell it out for you: nabokov was definitely influenced by poe and worked his writings and work into his own. to say nabokov wasn't appreciative of poe is absurd, despite what nabokov's own facetious comments might indicate. it's self evident if you actually read nabokov.

I like Poe, even if he did marry his 12 year old cousin.

I'm not a fan. His rythm is too rigid, there is no subtlety or nuance. His rhyme is too predictable as well imo.

I didn't say style. Even if I did, you have absolutely nothing to stand on when you say "I'm not sure they bastardized it" considering you haven't even fucking read him yet. Ditch your biases when you read a book.

I've read a little Whitman in a compilation I own, just not enough to form an opinion yet.

>implying predictability is inherently bad

sure got spooky in here

Was he secretly the GOAT?

His English is patball to Joyce's champion game.

openly

Who said it's inherently bad? I said I'm not a fan, and that is my reason for not liking him.

Yeah but I'd prefer to read about something else than the dirty poor Irish, and his prose is almost as good.

>bloom
>dirty poor
u wot

Someone feeling sore about the current climate eh?

I meant the Irish in general. Like saying niggers are dumb. NDT is pretty smart, but it doesn't change my statement.

>nabokov was definitely influenced by poe
Stopped reading there, this is pure nonsense. A few passing references do not constitute "influence" or "appreciation." You think like a philistine.
> it's self evident if you actually read nabokov.
This is so poorly phrased, I feel nauseous.