>want to get into poetry
>pick up an anthology at a used book store
>start reading it
>literally every poem alludes to the Odyssey, which I haven't read
why do poets do this
Want to get into poetry
Daniel Brooks
Easton Bell
>he didn't start with the Greeks
Jonathan Young
>plagiarising Homer for 2300 years
Poetry is a meme.
Jose Cook
Read some Whitman. Leaves of grass is very timely read. Fuck 1984, people need to read whitman.
Blake Allen
Just read The Odyssey. It's fun, relatively easy, and incredibly rewarding. You can probably finish it in a week or two. And The Iliad is even better.
Christian Sanchez
>guy mentions poetry
>immediately someone recommends "whitman" and even throws in 1984
you should kill yourself, you skipped about 2000+years of poetry to recommend the most popular american poet. congrats. faggot.
Colton Morgan
It's easy to read, but there's a ton of stuff beneath the surface that's difficult to understand, especially if you read a translation because the original has a lot of wordplay that can't be translated.
Parker Adams
>you need to have read every single poet in the Western tradition before you can even THINK about reading the guy who tried (and really in large measure managed) to develop a poetics independent of that tradition
Would you fucking cool it, my man? Whitman is worth reading for people of all stages of literary education. Heck, you can even read Ulysses and get a great deal out of it without having previously read the Odyssey or Hamlet, just like I did. Chock on a dick, my man. Not everybody feels the need to have their hand held through a mindless completionist project of reading the entire canon.
Mason Gray
Give Wordsworth a try.
Tyler Barnes
not that guy but why the fuck do people say this like its an offhand thing to just learn ancient greek so they can get deeper into a work that had been analysed to shit already over the past 2500 years anyway, I mean fucking come on
>especially if you read a translation
what do you mean "especially"? are you under the impression that there is something unusual about not learning a dead language when you could spend the time reading a fuckton of actual texts in the time it would take to learn it?!