i don't consider myself an avid reader, but i enjoy it. what i don't get is poetry. in fact, i've never read a poetry book.
but recently searching here in Veeky Forums some user wrote about reading poetry just being capable on conjuring the images on the mind, thing i'm pretty good on. so i kinda want to dip my hands on it.
what are some good poetry books for someone who has never got into it?
i can read in english and spanish if that helps.
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You can read most great poetry for free online.
>Shakespeare
>W.B. Yeats
>Alfred, Lord Tennyson
>Basho
>Issa
>Oshikochi no Mitsune
>Kikaku
>Keats
>Milton
>Homer
>J.R.R. Tolkien
>William Blake
>Emily Dickenson
>T.S. Eliot
>Ezra Pound
You can start with these. Unfortunately, I don't know any Hispanic poets to suggest.
Perhaps someone else can make those suggestions.
If you start by going backwards, you'll hate it. Poetry is the verbal music of the epoch. The only reason to go backwards is to accumulate the academic foundation for a degree. I think Keats is great, but my appreciation is academic. So unless you're the kind of reader who thinks it's really exciting to know that his buddy Trelawney plucked his charred heart of his funeral pyre on the beach, you will probably find Keats to be dated and obscure and irrelevant.
Most poetry, in fact, is all three. What academics discover, though, is that they occasionally find one here or there whose work sounds like something they wish they had thought of, and they become fans.
Personally, I dig Marianne Moore and Mark Strand. And Robert Lowell. And Dylan Thomas.
If you search wide enough, you might find two or three you like too.
Nonsense. I can understand why you might have this opinion, but, honestly, it is a shameful stance to take.
For starters,
>Most poetry, in fact, is all three (dated, obscure, and irrelevant)
is just plain hogwash.
Most poetry cannot possibly be irrelevant as it is dealing with themes which will be relevant to man as long as man is man.
Dated, only in language perhaps, and a great deal of poetry does not fit this description.
Also, some of the appeal of past poetry is its language - precisely because it is dated.
Obscure, maybe, though only due to how generally ignorant and unread most of mankind actually is.
>you might find two or three you like too
Or ten or a dozen, or one hundred. You're projecting your own experience as expectation.
>You're projecting your own experience as expectation.
I'm afraid the collective experiences of tens of thousands of undergraduates every year are on my side. The standard line of the muh humanities crowd, aside from being structurally identical to the arguments for preserving the equally dubious forms of opera and ballet, are belied by the fact that every year since their inception, between 6 and 9 of the best selling poetry volumes have been Christmas books, required academic syllabus fodder, or Dr. Seuss.
>the collective experiences of tens of thousands of undergraduates every year are on my side
You're appealing to a statistic which is entirely imaginary, and could literally be said of almost anything without actually proving yourself correct.
Not only that, but, if anything, the consent of the masses to your point of view only makes it that much less likely to be true.
Also, I think you forgot that I said,
>due to how generally ignorant and unread most of mankind actually is
You're only supporting my argument.
Similarly, appealing to what makes the best-seller lists is about as relevant to the quality of poetry as the "highest grossing films" are to the potential of film as a medium, or as the best seller book lists are to works of literary genius.
They are completely irrelevant for the same reason I have already mentioned.
Just as the majority of man has little to no experience with, or capacity for, appreciating the great works of literature, science, or anything else, the lists which show what interests them and what they spend their money on are entirely useless as benchmarks for the quality of any art form.
Ask 100 people who their favorite contemporary artists are in any field and you'll likely get 100 memes.
1.Goethe-Erlking
2.Goethe-Faust
3-Dante -The Dividend Comedy
You're talking like you don't know who the Poet Laureate of the U.S is-
en.wikipedia.org
Poetry is nonsense and worship of the worship of poetry. Absolutely no one gives a fuck but other poets and artists. The whole discipline is created to make people feel like their words are deep and meaningful.
Don't believe me? Google children's poetry and the efforts behind trying to get children to write poetry. It's worse than modern art, at least that takes skill sometimes.
>no Byron
>Bryon
>Great
If you were going to complain you should have said Keats.
I would've said Keats but he is on the list.
Byron is great. He can be ruthless, he wrote about a dead love:
>The flower in ripen’d bloom unmatch’d
>Must fall the earliest prey;
>Though by no hand untimely snatch’d,
>The leaves must drop away:
>And yet it were a greater grief
>To watch it withering, leaf by leaf,
>Than see it pluck’d to-day;
>Since earthly eye but ill can bear
>To trace the change to foul from fair.
...
>And more thy buried love endears
>Than aught except its living years.
He's brutal. I like his "Darkness" as well.
>>J.R.R. Tolkien
What are you smoking?
I can't believe someone could be so full of shit
>dubious forms of opera and ballet
OH MY FUCK
I've heard that Norton Anthology of Poetry is a good starting point. IIRC, it only collects english poetry, so I'd recommend you to get translations of the essential foreign books as well - Il Canzoniere and Les Fleurs du mal, for example. In a translation you will lose the original sound, but the meaning will be largely intact, and that is quite enough to leave an impression on the reader (personally, I was moved nearly to tears while reading Petrarca in translation).
Wrong. Awards are nonsense, and you're an idiot. Congratulations.
I'm all for Byron. I left off many poets I like - I just didn't feel like listing them all.
Feel free to add.
I think Tolkien's poetry is great. It may be simple, but it's comfy.
>I can read English and Spanish
>Suggest a bunch of Japanese poets
??????????????????????????????????????
Yes, contemporary poetry is pretty bad, which is why you should start from the beginning. There's enough good past poets to satisfy you for the rest of your life.
I suggested poets I think are great.
Even the translations of the Japanese are worth reading. Sure you'll get more out of it in the original, but if we wait till we're all fluent in every language with poetry worth reading until we read the works, we'll shut ourselves off from much of the worlds literary treasures. There are simply too many languages with great works.
I do speak Japanese, but I started reading Japanese lit long before I did, and, in part, this is what convinced me to study the language.
The same was true for me of Latin. I read Roman history and mythology and this fueled my desire to learn the language.
That's just me, but hopefully you can see where I'm coming from.
>my argument.
...is a series of veiled insults and arrogant pontification about the virtues of your ugly baby. I notice OP has yet to ring in. He'll agree with me too. Congratulations on hallucinating dwindling obscurity into an asset. Stay warm on the side of your Grecian Urn.
>haha start with ezra pound
stop, you retards
4chanlit.wikia.com/poetry
>offers nothing
>proceeds to criticize
Typical Veeky Forumsizen, typical person. One of the masses who exist only to envy, complain, and obey.
Enjoy your life as an unproducing parasite.
>reading translations of a language as different as Japanese
You're a psued. The only good translated book of Asian poetry is Cathay by Ezra Pound and that's barely a translation
Byron is mediocre.
>Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words. I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing in English. The ordinary person talks English, but only a few people in every generation can write it; and upon this undeliberate collaboration between a great many people talking a living language and a very few people writing it, the continuance and maintenance of a language depends. Just as an artisan who can talk English beautifully while about his work or in a public bar, may compose a letter painfully written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader, and decorated with words like “maelstrom” and “pandemonium”: so does Byron write a dead or dying language.
>t. TS Eliot
As I said, I am fluent.
Also, considering my roommate is Japanese and a linguist, I'll take his opinion over yours, pseud.
The best thing about this thread is how many of you worthless, non-contributing shitposters come in to a thread, I rescued, present nothing of value, but still think your opinions matter.
Lmao. Not a one of you has even tried to suggest any Hispanic poets, as I suggested.
Not even this goon .
These are the only two people who aren't completely worthless out of the lot of you.
Congratulations. You're all a bunch of mediocre, self-aggrandizing, cattle.
>reddit spacing
Also Hispanic poets are shit
That's what OP asked for, moron.
As for "Reddit spacing," clearly you would know. I, on the other hand, don't have any experience with Reddit.
>That's what OP asked for, moron.
He didn't ask for Hispanic poets, he asked for poets in general and said that he knows english and spanish. Spain is a country, you know.
>As for "Reddit spacing," clearly you would know. I, on the other hand, don't have any experience with Reddit.
You sure talk like you do