Poets

I'm an absolute barbarian, only having read Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot (these are the only ones I remember, thusly the only ones worth mentioning), could anyone point me into the right direction?

Tang dynasty poets;
Georg Trakl;
19th c French chaps...

Tennyson
Goethe
Pound
Yeats

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

>Wordsworth
Read literally any other Romantic poet. Wordsworth was a hack.

English poets, largely from the long 18th century (obvious exception being Shakespeare).
John Wilmot (CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED AND UNDER-READ)
Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats, etc.

Still kind of a prosody noob but the great thing about the aforementioned if their beautiful, even to the uninitiated. The more or learn, the more I appreciate.
Honorary mention to these here.
bit mean but not wholly untrue.

Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Prévert, Wordsworth, Whitman, Shelley, Cummings, Plath, Kipling, Yeats, Byron are some of my favourites.

I really need to step up my French game, with the amount of poetry it will open up

is there any good poet for absolute beginner?

Miljković, Nastasijević, Crnjanski, Ilić, Rimbaud, Baudelaire.
It's Serbian realism and neosymbolism/surrealism, with French symbolism.

muh dude. Wallace Stevens is my favorite writer. I just love him so much. If you have the time, read Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age. It's pretty much a butthurt catholic wishing Stevens was on his side. Oh and read Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. It's amazing. If you have soulseek, both are on there.

But as of lately, I've really been into Denise Levertov. She's just so amazing. He utilization of free verse reminds me of Whitman, but far less annoying.

forgot to post this
Shel Silverstein. You think I'm kidding, but I'm really not.

Lately, Bukowski. Recently,
Rumi.

>Whitman's alright, but I think it's "babby's first poet" tier.
this is because you know nothing about poetry. Whitman is "baby's first" yet Frost and Hemingway aren't? please

Been reading almost exclusively Robert Creeley for the past few days. Here's one of his most famous poems - to understand him better one should keep in mind a lot of his early work (this is an earlyish poem) is in large part about the "activity of writing" as he called it.

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

I love Coleridge. Does that make me a pleb?

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

poetry seem inserting where should I start?

I love you both so much.

Neruda, Brecht, Tucholsky

The good ones.

George, Rilke

Hah! Pleb. A true patrician only reads the worst poets.

Blake, Milton, and Dante

>Miljković
Maj nigr.

Can someone recommend me some good American poets? I've read a lot of English poetry, but little from the States.

Lately I've been fucking with Shakespeare's sonnets. Cool stuff. Want to get more into English language poetry. Where should I go from Sex Spear? English ain't my native language but I can understand most of the sonnets.

Stevens, WCW, Frost and Crane
Eliot, HD and Pound if you consider them American.

Robinson Jeffers
Dylan Thomas

we would make great friends.

Both Frost and Whitman are good entry level poets but they have plenty of depth for a more advanced reader

My man.

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

who else /DHLAWRENCE/ here

Into Gottfried Benn lately. Not sure he has a wide readership among readers of English. Was affiliated with the Reich for a while, and some of his stuff is rather disturbing.

I love his poetry, very underrated. He's a much better poet than novelist imo.
Favorite poems? My favorites are figs and Bavarian gentians.

I bought this massive anthology of his poems along with several of his novels but Ive only really dug as far his rhyming poetry so, I like 'Virgin Youth' where he compares he boner to the column of flame by night, (which im just now realizing is what guided the jews out of the desert), `love on the farm' is good.

His novels are pretty far down on my backlog but maybe Ill have a crack at it after east of eden, after the good book.

Ginsberg, Whitman, Blake, various anthologies

A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg, 1926 - 1997

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

—Berkeley, 1955

I have this printed on and pinned above my desk. It's my motivation. Oh, and this too.

Cesárea Tinajero

the older I get, the more I can't stand Ginsberg or beats in general. It's just so fucking surface.

Keep telling yourself that

I'm an absolute turbo-pleb when it comes to poetry. I only like rhyming, narrative poetry like Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Lays of Ancient Rome.

Don't get me wrong, he's still great. I think Reality Sandwiches is probably the best thing he's ever put out, but overall, he's a bit surface sometimes.

Don't worry. That's how it usually starts. First exposure to poetry for many are the classic three quatrains, or even sonnets. (Shakespearean or French).
Later, if your interest in poetry broadens, you'll start appreciating classical verse -- hexameters and pentameters . . .
It's difficult to step into free verse (for me it was) because the learned poetry is extremely well-understood (with respect to meter and rhyme), and because great poetry 'just flows' many don't try understanding meter; free verse (GOOD free verse, let me say -- no 'experimental' Kauresque or similar) relies strongly on metrical patterns, or speech patterns.
The logical step from bound, to free verse is the poem in prose. But start slow.

What? Pound personality was the best! Why would you want to fuck him up? He wore sombreros, for fuck's sake

Rupi kaur

delete this right now

Keats
Yeats
Plath
Elizabeth Bishop

Step one- find a big building
Step two- find an open window on the top floor
step three- throw yourself or the book out the window.

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Pessoa, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, Shelley, Stevens, Hardy

Michael Robbins anyone?

Is there a good book for intro to poetry, or should I just read the relevant Wikipedia articles?

Also, will likely pick up some Dickinson and Eliot for my first serious foray into poetry, hope you agree.

You can find these used pretty cheap, older editions etc. Pretty good intro with explains meter etc., quality paper (because they are actually small college textbooks) and a great selection of poems (my 5th edition has over 300 poems). I found mine at a Goodwill.

>sd
>yr
What the fuck is the point of this? Or of the whole poem, for that matter? I feel so stupid sometimes when I read poetry like this: apparently straightforward language, but the whole thing doesn't seem to mean anything to me, nothing makes sense. I get this feeling usually when I try to read Wallace Stevens or Hart Crane or Eliot, but not for all the poems I tried. Some of them click, at least in part. This one though, if you ignore the random (or so it seems to me) like breaks, sounds like a very short prose text (I cannot discern any metre or rhyme) extracted from a larger text and pretty much meaningless outside its context. I just don't get it.

>Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Good taste.
Her lips were red, her looks were free
Her hair was yellow as gold
Her skin was white as leprosy
The night mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she
Who thicks men's blood with cold.

Hemingway's poetry is absolute shit. It's Jim Morrison tier trash.

you're overthinking it, user. not everything has to be symbolic. remember that poems are meant to be read out loud and heard. i'm pretty sure here that creely spelled like this to imitate speech--often times we pronounces words without vowels and you can imagine "said" pronounced with a hiss and a "d" sound without the standard "eh" vowel sound, and same goes for "your" pronounced as a growl in the throat.

i think it's pretty clear that the poem's narrator is lower class, maybe drunk, and recounting a time he was bullshitting with his friend. it gives character to the speakers as well, since "yr" is more of a growling sound than "your," it emphasizes the fact that John is admonishing the speaker

Bob Dylan, W.H Auden, Wilde, Woodsworth, Dickinson.

4chanlit.wikia.com/poetry

A. E. Housman

see
why would you start with Eliot, a poet whose own work was a reaction to what came before it?

what the fuck
Eliot's work was partially a reaction to what came before him (as all work tends to be) but more than anything it was as a reaction to modern society and how he saw it. Eliot uses a shitload of allusions in his poems, sure, but you can get a lot from his work without knowing everything he references.

...

>Dryden
My nigga

Who else /Chaucer/ here?

if someone's stupid enough to do it, go ahead and read Eliot first and realize you know nothing about what you're reading. it's contextual reading, why on earth would you ever encourage somebody to start with 20th century poetry? oh yeah, because you're stupid, that's why.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

the other anons right more or less
you will of course miss out on a lot of the meaning if you start with Eliot without knowing anything, but a readthrough of the wikipedia page is enough to let someone understand the fundementals of what Eliot was doing. If a poem can't be appreciated on some level by the layman it will not survive. Just because Eliot has many obscure allusions does not detract from the visceral aesthetic impact of his style, this goes for all canonised poets.

Leopardi, Szymborska, Larkin, Pound, Martinsson, Crane, Miłosz, Tranströmer, Byron, random Anglo-Saxon poetry

Thoughts on the Aeneid?

Fan fiction.

The whole anti-semitic fascist thing is a pretty big turn off

Pretty good as far as fanfics go, I'd say

Pretty much true

Chaeles simic

I like Simic he's great, have you read anything from The Lunatic?

I like the 1805 version of The Prelude. He is my least favorite English Romantic poet though.

I took a class on Canterbury Tales. The professor was strict about pronunciation but it was really smart and a lot of fun. She had a tight little ass too.

The Sleeper

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

Oh, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop—
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully—so fearfully—
Above the closed and fringéd lid
’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold—
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
And wingéd pannels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o’er the crested palls
Of her grand family funerals—

Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portals she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

>Why wasn't I here sooner?

Eliot and Yeats are favourites of mine, but I also like the romantics, Blake in particular. Frost is also nice

serious question: how do you (personally) read poetry? I usually read novels or drama and I never really know how to approach poems. How many times should I read a poem? How do I choose what to read from a given poet's collected works? I guess I'm just asking for tips

Yeah read it aloud if you can

Uberpleb here. Literally the only poems I've liked enough to read multiple times are Eliot's Prufrock, Blake's The Tyger, and Houseman's Blue Remembered Hills (I don't think it has an actual title). Any recommendations?

>"strict"
>not "anal"

c'mon user

My uni library had a collection of Creeley but whenever I looked at his poems they felt mediocre. Should I give him another chance?

Coleridge is patrish, bud.

It's actually been the opposite for me desu

Hopkins and Donne are my favorites

Gary Snyder

Riprap

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.

Poetry is for faggots, your dads should have smacked you more

Go read your genre fiction