You HAVE read The Waste Land, the most important poem of the 20th century, right? I see a serious lack of poetry discussion on /lit/ and it makes me suspect its posters of that rather common disease of the 21st century autodidact, a preference for prose over poetry.
>>24999455Poetry is for pseuds
>>24999455Yeats is better and makes more sense>a preference for prose over poetrypoetry is much easier to read and you can statpad your goodreads with a bunch of poetry books
>>24999455Being an autodidact of the 21st Century I prefer poetry enough to know that Rilke and Neruda both mog Eliot. The Wasteland is a great poem for the Anglo condition but hardly the best 20th Century poetry.
>>24999455>t. hasn't read the manuscript version, where Pound's editorial influence is clearly the decisive factor in the end product
>>24999553As a lover of wisdom I care not for the obfuscations of fiction, be they prose or verse.
I mean I have indeed read the wasteland, and maybe it is the most important poem of the 20th century historically, but it is no where near the best. It's not even my favorite Eliot poem. I agree there is not enough poetry discussion here though
>>24999455I love poetry but stick mostly to lyric and epic poetry. For me the purpose of poetry, and what differentiates it from prose, is emotional density and immediacy, like the difference between a faithful description and a metaphor. Most modernist poetry, obscured by references and ideas, leaves me cold.
>>24999455>O O O O>That Shakespeherian Rag>It's so elegant, so intelligent
>>24999455Not everyone here is 15
>>24999580not all truth can be portrayed through elaboration. some truth is shown. you can either live or read fiction to access it
>>24999455>freeversenot poetry
>>24999588>emotional density and immediacyBut that's exactly what the modernists were striving for. Extreme condensation of expressive subject matter. The emotional temperature of traditional poets like Wordsworth can seem almost tepid in comparison.
>>24999602It passes in and out of metre for an illustration of purpose.
>>24999602
>>24999603Untrue; the modernists primarily sought to express ideas, not emotions. A Wordsworth poem like She was a Phantom of Delight is primarily felt while no one reads The Waste Land without a companion to explain wtf is going on. That grappling with comprehension detracts from resonance
>>24999609In other words, the tryhard
>>24999455>I see a serious lack of poetry discussion on /lit/ and it makes me suspect its posters of that rather common disease of the 21st century autodidact, a preference for prose over poetry.Yeah that's projection. Everybody, if you'd like an example of projection, please refer to OP.
>>24999622>the modernists primarily sought to express ideas, not emotionsThis is completely false and doesn't align with anything the modernists said about their own poetry. Your complaint has nothing to do with emotional expressiveness, but is instead about difficulty and obscurity. Yes, a poem like The Waste Land requires a companion to properly understand, but once you do understand it the emotional expressiveness should be obvious. The entire poem is centred around the emotions of ennui and despair and hope. The modernists, unlike the romantics, believed intellect and emotion were not opposed, but they did not believe that poetry should be unemotional.
>>24999643What else can explain the lack of poetry discussion on /lit/? 99% of 'serious readers' you meet are people that started reading as adults after realising the importance of self-education. Their introduction to literature is classic novels, and as a result they're virtually permanent novel readers. At best they'll read some philosophy like Plato, maybe some Homer or Shakespeare, but they wont actually know anything about poetry.
>>24999455>il miglior fabbro MOGS
>>24999577There’s a stanza he cuts out which is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read>Odours, confected by the cunning French>Disguise the good old hearty female stench.>>24999549>>24999455Mysterious process occurred in the 20th century of the death of verse, which should be the most natural and popular form for artistic use of language. Also the most important writers of modern times did this in prose form (pound said this 100 years ago so it applies to a degree to the 19th century)
I myself (as a modern) was first only into prose but have come to prefer verse
>>24999549Richard Wagner said 150+ years ago that lyric poetry gave him very little pleasure and he found it repulsive in the modern world. If you're curious about what exactly he meant search his wife's diaries
>>24999602Your thoughts on the Psalms?
I read part of it but gave up. I'm either too retarded or too ignorant to get anything out of it. I'll have to stick to kitsch and easy classics, I guess.
>>24999985Schopenhaur said the same thing
>>24999985>>25000103They were talking about German romantic lyric poetry. The same critique does not apply to 20th century modernist lyric poetry.
>>25000111This comment wasn't exclusive to German language writing. Any distinction between romantic and modernist is artificial, and modernist poetry, especially in the following generations, has a much less robust basis. Such an attitude doesn't apply to Baudelaire and others who are true seers, but it is reasonable to say that lyric poets are lesser artists than those who create great characters -- especially in the modern world where lyric poetry feels inauthentic. I can't imagine how William Carlos Williams could give anyone much pleasure. The Waste Land is a sublime poem
>>25000130Unrelated but what are your thoughts on Pound, anon?
>>25000165Probably too much of a scholar of poetry to be a great poet, but I have enjoyed reading above any American
And I really like his personality in his critical and economic writings
>>24999455Anyone can read The Waste Land, but unless you’ve read all the other texts it references then you’re not gonna get much out of it. A familiarity with the western canon is essential. It’s not that /lit/ doesn’t read poetry, it’s that /lit/ doesn’t read enough whatsoever. So what would be the point in reading something entirely constructed from a literary tradition you know nothing about?
/lit/ doesn't care much for Anglo literature and that includes both poetry and prose. /lit/ doesn't talk much about non English poetry because poetry is much more difficult to translate than prose. English poetry is very overrated by monolinguals. Milton was the last great English poet, after that it's easily the worst European poetry of note
>>25000130>it is reasonable to say that lyric poets are lesser artists than those who create great charactersNot necessarily true, they're just different modes of expression>especially in the modern world where lyric poetry feels inauthentic.Why? If anything it's the opposite. There is zero tolerance for narrative poetry these days
>>24999455No. Poetry is gay.
>>25000444Can’t argue with double trips, I’m gay now
>>25000353>English poetry is very overrated by monolinguals. Milton was the last great English poet, after that it's easily the worst European poetry of note
>>24999580Based anon
Prufrock mogs
>>25000515Spanish is the second worst
> I see a serious lack of poetry discussion on /lit/ and it makes me suspect its posters of that rather common disease of the 21st century autodidact, a preference for prose over poetry.Because /lit/cels prefer consuming manchild """literature""" over reading poetry
>>25000680>Because /lit/cels prefer consuming manchild """literature"""Mccarthy, Pynchon, and DFW are far less popular here now than they used to be, so we’re headed in the right direction. We just need more people like you and me calling out the manchild core like Wolfe, Tolkien, Pynchon, et. al and keep pushing more poetry threads. But it’s good that there’s people like us in the same wavelength.
>>24999602Milton btfo of you people 350 years ago>The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin—rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings—a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.-Paradise Lost: The Versetl;dr: Rhyming verse is gay and you're stupid for liking it.
>>25000771That's blank verse, not free verse. Also much of Milton's critique of rhyme can be applied to meter as well
>>25000712>its not within the conventions of specifically cultural literary fashions of a short period of time from late Victorian to early post modernism so therefore its not serious this is the midwit take
>>25000797but I judge through the slender window of my time therefore anything that does not speak to the 21st ce modern burger experience is irrelevant and literally fatphobic tho
>>24999971Kek, literally the hundred year old version of>imagine the smell
>>25000811Unforutnately that woman is probably skinnier than the average american woman by now
>>25000771Milton wrote blank verse, not free verse you dumbass.
>>24999549The /lit/ definition of pseud is "people more intelligent than you."
>>24999971>the most disgusting thing I’ve ever readRead moar.
>>24999622This is arse. If you can't discern the emotion in The Waste Land, get checked for autism.
>>25000345>you can't read that unless you've read thisI'm sick of hearing this bullshit on /lit/. I first read The Waste Land when I was 24, and loved it.
>>25000353hello saar
>>25000811Tell a fat woman she's actually fat, and see if she gives a fuck or not.
>>24999455There are less than 2-3 dozen great poets in all human history.
>>25001781>>25001776I don't believe you. Which parts genuinely moved you? When he inserted sentences in random languages you don't speak?
>>25001847The desolation of the Great War and its aftermath is ingrained in every line, pleb.
>>25001770The idea of being purposefully disgusting is rather new to literature. This beats anything in Joyce. You should share what you think is better. I didn't post the whole stanza, actually its I think 2, I mean a certain section pound cut, because Id have to log on to internet archive. It's a very subtly wrought effect of pure disgust.
>>24999455>>24999603>>24999645Pleb question here but how am I supposed to even get into Modernist poetry as a Verselet? I assume these people didn't expect their audience to be combing through guides to understand what they're saying, but they grew up learning Latin/Greek and reading the classics which doesnt happen today because humanities education is non-existent and thus an uphill, private affair. Obviously this is a lot of cope on my part but even as someone who tries to read a lot I feel thoroughly over my head trying to read Eliot and Pound.
>>25002252As another pleb I like the poem but don't get it. It's just a bunch of strange imagery with some impenetrable, mysterious parts to me.It's referencing classics but still a product of its time, referencing other contemporary or slightly older references to classics so just reading classics won't give the right context. The Shakespeare line is apparently referencing a popular song from the time. There's basically no way to know without guides. The Bible or the Greeks won't make any real sense either without insight from people studying the cultures that produced them.
>>25002252>how am I supposed to even get into Modernist poetry as a Verselet?The answer is that you're not meant to read Eliot and Pound until you have a solid education in traditional English poetry. You don't have to be extremely erudite, but just enough to understand scansion and major poetic styles. Eliot and Pound include so many references in their poems that of course they didn't expect their audiences to understand everything, even with a classical education, but they did expect them to make an effort to. Eliot even wrote Notes on The Waste Land to identify the overt references and quotations for his audience. You're not in over your head, this is the normal learning process.
>>24999603Wordsworth is often tepid and boring, and not “traditional” by any meaning the word>>24999645Was about to make this response but this does it better. Eliot is making references in the Waste Land but that’s not what make it a great poem (if anything its a strike against Eliot’s originality—but he did make it work in this performance), there’s an ambiguous emotionality propelling the work, at a certain point I found it totally enchanting, without knowing that he’s quoting Verlaine or the passage from Cleopatra he’s reworking.>>25002252You may overestimate classical education back then. I don’t think Yeats knew any Latin or Greek and many people have complained about the practice of forcing kids to learn it young (Schopenhauer) or found their own Latin education pointless and boring (Balzac). But really, knowing dead languages will not make you appreciate poetry more—more likely, a love for poetry will make you interested in other languages. You need to not worry about whether you understand something but appreciate the beauty of the expression.
>>25002289This isn’t true, you actually may be more ikely to connect with Eliot because he’s modern. Many people have found Eliot as their gateway to “traditional poetry” (which is a pretty meaningless term)>>25002285It’s not likely he’s arguing a thesis or anything. That’s what the poem is, ideally all these images and mysteries should form a unity, which I think they do.
Art forms succeed when they seem to merge into other form—literature approaching the movement of music, music becoming a human language. To say you need classical education to appreciate a piece of music is absurd, and it is the same with poetry. Insofar as this is the case Eliot and Pound have failed as artists.
>>25002304I say you shouldn't read Eliot before reading 'traditional poetry', which is an obvious term for describing poetry that uses metre and was written before the 20th century, because his entire approach depends on identifying verse going back and forth between metrical freedom and metrical regularity. Sure, someone can read Eliot as their first poet without knowing anything about poetry and love him, but they wont properly appreciate him until they've come back to after having read traditional English poetry which he is continually referencing.
>>25002352If you are right then this is a strike against Eliot. You would never say you can only appreciate Shakespeare if you’re read Marlowe or Ovid. The metrical invention Eliot is mirroring black syncopation which he was exposed to in childhood. Do you need to know Wordsworth to properly appreciate rap music
>>25002356If you knew nothing about English poetry then of course your appreciation of Shakespeare would be extremely limited. You wouldn't even understand what iambic pentameter is. And in inverse fashion reading Roman poets will undoubtedly expand one's appreciation of Shakespeare. Nothing is self-sufficiently comprehensible, everything, in some form, is comprehended in the light given off by something else.
>>24999455I've read The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, which is inspired by and quotes the poem several times, so I've basically read the poem itself
"What The Waste Land is suggesting, over and over again with these allusions, is that if you can read this line, if you know this line, then you feel what I feel because you know too that the past I'm evoking here is now in fragments.For many many readers, including almost all of my students, the allusions in The Waste Land do not open the poem up...the allusions close it down. They make it hard to read and almost impossible to understand or even enjoy. T.S Eliot wrote in this poem 'but at my back in a cold blast I hear the rattle of the bones and chuckles spread from ear to ear.' It is an allusion to Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress. Eliott's British critic, Harold Monro, wrote: "but at my back I always hear Mr. Elliot's intellectual sneer." Fair enough, fair enough. But the thing is the difficulty of Eliot's allusions are part of their function. The Waste Land is a kind of test. If you get enough of the allusions in The Waste Land then you will share Eliot's despair because you obviously know the tradition whose death Eliot is lamenting.Probably the most radical step that The Waste Land takes, that Modernist poetry takes, is that it is not at all interested in talking to everybody. It has a specific audience in mind and it will leave most readers behind as a consequence of that."https://youtu.be/JO8rEIddgrI
>>25002313>To say you need classical education to appreciate a piece of music is absurdBut music is the lowest form of art, it's the medium that all men can appreciate despite lacking any education. Higher arts like drama do indeed require such education to fully appreciate in full, and arguably this is also true of music, but that baseline level is there still.
>>25002366>If you knew nothing about English poetry then of course your appreciation of Shakespeare would be extremely limited. You wouldn't even understand what iambic pentameter is.But the average person who "appreciated' Shakespeare in his own time did not understand such things, only an elite few did. Nonetheless, he was a mass hit.
Nonsense. That's like saying you need to be familiar with every broadway play and late 20th century sitcom to appreciate Family Guy. Knowing that Eliot is quoting Donne or that Family Guy is parodying Guys and Dolls doesn’t change the resonance of whats happening. It changes how thickly you experiencing it, and guess what? You can never match them in one billion years! The references aren’t initiation rites you pass through to understand the work. In both cases, you’re watching a a super genius talk to itself using the only language it has left its own recycled voices and its way more entertaining than reading down a hit list to pretend to have an experience same as the creator.
>>25002489Of course, Shakespeare was judged according to the taste of commoners who were familiar with Elizabethan theatre, nevertheless the full genius of Shakespeare was not open to them. Although there's quite a difference between reading Shakespeare and seeing performances of Shakespeare ordained by the Bard himself. The common person doesn't have to learn to recognise iambic pentameter if he's hearing an actor speak it. But we're talking about reading Shakespeare.
>>25002485>But music is the lowest form of artThis place is truly a cesspool. I'm done lol. I wonder with this view if you've experienced aesthetic contemplation once in your life.
>>25002489These people seem to not know what aesthetic appreciation even is. It's completely intuitive and sensuous. Knowing what iambic pentameter is is irrelevant. It's the force of the words as sense, sound, rhythm moves through the soul. Your appreciation of this can be heightened through study and familiarity with the medium but it isn't something that the knowledge of academic technical concepts has anything to do with.
>>25002661"Recognizing iambic pentameter" doesn't make the experience of iambic pentameter any more enjoyable, that is when we are talking about aesthetic enjoyment rather than the enjoyment of indulging an idiot vanity Anyway Shakespeare went completely out of favor for many decades after his death--and this was the decision of people who knew all about iambic pentameter, I assure you.
I Just downloaded pic related, what am I in for?
>>25002700>"Recognizing iambic pentameter" doesn't make the experience of iambic pentameter any more enjoyableOf course it does, are you retarded? If you're not hearing the metrical rhythm of poetry while reading it then you're not reading poetry.>Shakespeare went completely out of favor for many decades after his deathNo he didn't, neither in the theatre nor in the minds of poets. You're thinking of the Restoration, but even then Shakespeare's plays survived in altered forms. What are you even trying to argue?
>>25002692>This place is truly a cesspool. I'm done lol.That music is the lowest form of art is not a particularly CONTROVERSIAL take. Aristotle and Schopenahaur and numerous other intellectuals agree.
>>25002661But to bring this back to the original issue, one cannot enjoy modernist poets like Eliot at this fundamental level that people can with The Bard. It takes no knoweldge to enjoy his works, yet further education can clue one into how great they really are. Without proper education, there can be no base enjoyment of Pound and Eliot, and many other modernist writers.
>>25003776Enlighten us on the highest form of art
>>25003776>Aristotle and Schopenahaur and numerous other intellectuals agree.No they don't and it's one of the dumbest statements ever uttered.
>>24999956fundatus
>>25003776Dude needs to listen to Iggy Pop.
>>25002717You seem like a very angry and smug person so there is little point engaging, and anyway after this post I am done with 4chan as its not good for a sensitive person like myself to be exposed long term to an endless torrent of nasty and idiotic insults. Your view is similar to saying that knowledge of music theory increases the pleasure of music. Of course it doesn’t, though there may be another level of contemplation you have accessed, but this is not the primordial experience of art which is the purpose of meter and all technical concepts of art in the first place
>>25003776You should reread Schopenhauer, or even just ask ChatGPT what Schopenhauer thought of music
>>25004319bitch ass nigga. where's your sack? at the shrink's office lmao
>>25004319This whole time you've refused to seriously intellectually engage in any argument. You run away from any point you're pressed on, quibble over unrelated things, and now you're crying like a little girl because an anonymous poster insulted your anonymous identity.>Your view is similar to saying that knowledge of music theory increases the pleasure of musicWhich is true. If you know absolutely nothing about sonata form then you're not going to be able to appreciate Mozart as much as is possible. A knowledge of harmony does not necessarily but very often can make one more emotionally sensitive to harmony. The average person is usually not particularly moved by high art, which demonstrates that being unconscious of artistic qualities, lacking an aesthetic education and refinement, usually limits one's ability to have a 'primordial experience of art'. I gather you disagree with this because you yourself lack an education in artistic matters and thus have never had the pleasure of being enlightened to greater beauty. For example, I already explained that if someone is reading poetry and doesn't understand metre, then it's possible they're not even going to be hearing the rhythm in the words. That's a blatant example of how the 'primordial experience of art' depends on knowledge.But this is all rather besides the point because poetry, through language, depends on conveying intellectual concepts, and does not rely solely on a direct sensuous impact for its emotional expressiveness like music does. If you don't have the knowledge of a poem's language then OF COURSE it wont be as emotionally expressive.>>25004359You've completely disengaged the intellect from the appreciation of art. Which for you means that if you don't immediately and vaguely instinctively 'understand' an artwork then you never will. But that's literally retarded. Everyone will come across an artwork that for some reason or another they don't quite understand at first look, but when they persevere and study it will suddenly click. This is a universal experience in appreciating art and you're depriving yourself of it because you want to defend being retarded and intellectually lazy and making no effort to appreciate art.
>>25004319>its not good for a sensitive person like myself to be exposed long term to an endless torrent of nasty and idiotic insultsFuck off retard.
>>24999455people aren't ready to hear this but TS Eliot is Ready Player One if it looked lik an intellectual text.
>>25004445I deleted it cuz I didn't want to hurt people's feelings but seeing as it's too late for late you didn't actually counter the idea you just called me retarded and insisted upon an untruth
>>25004518I did counter the idea. Sometimes it takes time to appreciate an artwork, sometimes you will see it in a different light after many years. If you've never had that experience then I pity you.
>>24999455>ou HAVE read The Waste Land, the most important poem of the 20th century, right?yes>I see a serious lack of poetry discussion on /lit/ and it makes me suspect its posters of that rather common disease of the 21st century autodidact, a preference for prose over poetry.i like the long ones about new york
>>24999455Many times.>That corpse you have planted last year in your garden, anon>Has it begun to sprout?
I only know English. I'm trapped in English poetry hell.
>>25006957>English poetry heavenftfy. Poetry is the natural literary form of English.
>>25006957English monolinguals always bemoan their fate as if English culture is subpar to the rest of Europe yet readily profit from the fact that English has the most diverse literature of any European language. It's very strange.
>>25007590It doesn't feel diverse to me. I wish I could read Latin, French and Russian. English hadn't cool stuff going on and our language just doesn't have the same capability and aesthetician value
>>25003798Schopenhaur says TRAGEDY. I assume most of the Greeks and Romans would have agreed.
>>25007600English literature has evolved over the ages more than the literature of any other country and at the same time has been subject to the influences of foreign literature more than any other country. No other language has been more experimentally used, more subject to constant innovation and reformation. So many poets have sweated under the effort of approximating Latin grammar or metre in English, so many have transposed French styles and cadences to English. With Slavic languages admittedly there is less linguistic transference but at least there are Conrad and Nabokov who may give a certain Slavic flavour to the English language. Any language that contains Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot and Pound is a master-language.
>>25006957You're a pothead who claims to love science but is "trapped" because he doesn't know mathYou CHOOSE to be trapped
>>25007729You're a fucking idiot.
