Reading English poetry radicalized me, because why does Blake, Wordsworth... suck so much yet are so celebrated?
They're celebrated because they're good. Your abysmal lack of taste is no mark against them.
gimme coleridge
ESL alertJust accept that no country, ever; not yours, not anyone elses; no matter how many centuries go by, no matter how many people are born and lived, no matter how hard you try to cultivate a native culture; you will never, EVER come close to matching the literary output of England, even until the heat death and eventual rebirth of the universe. At which point England will repeat herself.Nothing compares. Not Moby Dick, not Proust, not Goethe, not Tolstoy. You have nothing to rally around, not even if you threw your scattered legacies into a common plot.There are the Greeks and then there is England.Hail Beowulf. Hail Shakespeare. Hail Paradife Loft. Hail Flashman.
I'm ESL and once I tried to read some Blake and I found it extremely corny. It didn't seem honest spirituality, it seemed like some artificial, armchair spirituality in order to avoid the disenchantment of the world after the Enlightment at all costs.
>>24927263Basically akin to modern Christian LARPers but in the 19th century.
>>24925846A lot of artistic movements exist by dint of one singular great artist. For the romantics its Byron, the rest is footnotes to his biography. >>24927217I agree with this anon. it took English culture approx 900 years to come up with THREE good authors (including Beowulf in that list is as intellectually dishonest as would be including La Chanson de Roland).
>>24927273Byron wasn't even close to the best romantic.
>>24927273Byron was the worst romantic by far.Scott was the best
>>24925846All poetry sucks and is gay.
>>24925846If you fail to understand Wordsworth, it is because you have failed to understand life. No poet in any language has even come close to understanding human nature so well and so succinctly putting it into verse in a way that can be so easily understood by everyone (except retards). The fact is that for a modern person it would be hard to understand Wordworth just by virtue of being so devoid of any real connection to their own nature and humanity.
>>24928379I actually feel the same and for that reason he's my favorite writer (except for maybe Homer). Good to find someone else that really feels like in Wordsworth they've truly found a writer who understands the most important facts of life
>>24928390Yeah he's my favourite. To me he quite easily spelled out 200 years ago exactly the sort of mindset necessary to endure the modern world. I really think he is like a prophet of secular spirituality. Despite me coming from the city, somehow everything makes so much sense.
