Great Poetry

[overkiller]

Ok, so admittedly I know way too little about poetry (excluding epic poetry, of which I know and love most of the big names), and I want to read more. I know some of you guys must be at least somewhat familiar with great works that you've run across over time. Recommend me your favorites! All I can offer is a cool Keats poem a girl recently told me about, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". You can read it here. Could be a MDB song.

[SomewhereInTime72]

Whoa, that is really good.

[Angelripper]

Originally Posted by overkiller

Ok, so admittedly I know way too little about poetry (excluding epic poetry, of which I know and love most of the big names), and I want to read more. I know some of you guys must be at least somewhat familiar with great works that you've run across over time. Recommend me your favorites! All I can offer is a cool Keats poem a girl recently told me about, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". You can read it here. Could be a MDB song.

We had to study that poem for English.

Utter tripe. Don't like poems written by the Romantics.

EDIT - The best poem we studied by a Romantic poet was Lord Byron's 'The Destruction of Sennacherib'.

http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/destruct.html

[DethMaiden]

I love all the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge (though you've probably read him), Byron, Shelley, Keats, and, if you consider them Romantics, Tennyson and Blake.

All incredible stuff, fuck the poseurs

[Div]

Check out William Blake. I know Bruce based The Chemical Wedding around his literature.

[zgodt]

I am almost overcome with joy at this thread. I have so many things I'd love to tell you about. Perhaps I'll do a "crash course in poetry history" thread some day soon, pointing out cool things here and there. (Since the English Romantics seem to singularly popular among the board crowd, perhaps ya'll can help me with them.)

Meanwhile, there have been and continue to be many fabulous poets writing amazing things in our own day and time. For instance, here's a ditty by A.R. Ammons, maybe the 20th century's greatest poet (imho), who died about 5 years ago. It's the first section of a book-length poem called Glare.



wdn't it be silly to be serious, now:
I mean, the hardheads and the eggheads

are agreed that we are an absurd
irrelevance on this slice of curvature

and that a boulder from the blue
could confirm it: imagine, mathematics

wiped out by a wandering stone, or
grecian urns not forever fair when

the sun expands: can you imagine
cracking the story off we've built

up so long—the simian ancestries,
the lapses and leaps, the discovery

of life in the burial of grains:
the scratch of pictorial and syllabic

script, millennia of evenings around
the fires: nothing: meaninglessness

our only meaning: our deepest concerns
such as death or love or child-pain

arousing a belly laugh or a witty
dismissal: a bunch of baloney: it's

already starting to feel funny: I
think I may laugh: few of the dead

lie recalled, and they have not
cautioned us: we are rippers and

tearers and proceeders: restraint
stalls us still—we stand hands

empty, lip hung, dumb eyes struck
open: if we can't shove at the

trough, we don't understand: but is
it not careless to become too local

when there are four hundred billion
stars in our galaxy alone: at

least, that's what I heard: also,
that there are billions of such

systems spread about, some older,
some younger than ours: if the

elements are the elements thruout,
I daresay much remains to be learned:

however much we learn, tho, we may
grow daunted by our dismissibility

in so sizable a place: do our gods
penetrate those reaches, or do all

those other places have their godly
nativities: or if the greatest god

is the stillness all the motions add
up to, then we must ineluctably be

included: perhaps a dribble of
what-is is what what-is is: it is

nice to be included, especially from
so minor a pew: please turn, in yr

hymnals, to page “Archie carrying on
again”: he will have it his way

though he has no clue what his way
is: after such participations as

that with the shrill owl in the
spruce at four in the morning with

the snow ended and the moon come
out, how am I sagely to depart from

all being (universe and all—by
that I mean material and immaterial

stuff) without calling out—just a
minute, am I not to know at last

what lies over the hill: over the
ridge there, over the laps of the

ocean, and out beyond the plasmas
of the sun's winds, and way out

where the bang still bubbles in the
longest risings: no, no: I must

get peanut butter and soda crackers
and the right shoe soles (for ice)

and leave something for my son and
leave these lines, poor things, to

you, if you will have them, can they
do you any good, my trade for my

harm in the world: come, let's
celebrate: it will all be over

[DethMaiden]

THREADCROMANCE

I still think English Romantic poetry is pretty much the be all, end all, but I have been getting really into one Pablo Neruda. Here's my favorite of his, translated for those non-Spanish speakers among us (albeit quite respectably):

"Walking Around"

It happens that I am tired of being a man.
It happens that I go into the tailor’s shops and the movies
all shriveled up, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating on a water of origin and ash.

The smell of barber shops makes me sob out loud.
I want nothing but the repose either of stones or of wool,
I want to see no more establishments, no more gardens,
nor merchandise, nor glasses, nor elevators.

It happens that I am tired of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It happens that I am tired of being a man.

Just the same it would be delicious
to scare a notary with a cut lily
or knock a nun stone dead with one blow of an ear.
It would be beautiful
to go through the streets with a green knife
shouting until I died of cold.

I do not want to go on being a root in the dark,
hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams,
downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth,
soaking it up and thinking, eating every day.

I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,
as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,
stiff with cold, dying with pain.

For this reason Monday burns like oil
at the sight of me arriving with my jail-face,
and it howls in passing like a wounded wheel,
and its footsteps towards nightfall are filled with hot blood.

And it shoves me along to certain corners, to certain damp houses,
to hospitals where the bones come out of the windows,
to certain cobblers’ shops smelling of vinegar,
to streets horrendous as crevices.

There are birds the colour of sulphur, and horrible intestines
hanging from the doors of the houses which I hate,
there are forgotten sets of teeth in a coffee-pot,
there are mirrors
which should have wept with shame and horror,
there are umbrellas all over the place, and poisons, and navels.

I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetfulness,
I pass, I cross offices and stores full of orthopedic appliances,
and courtyards hung with clothes on wires,
underpants, towels and shirts which weep
slow dirty tears.

Pablo Neruda

[translated by W.S. Merwin]

[ChildrenofSodom]

Darkness by Lord Byron is a kickass poem. Check it out.

[Div]

now this is a story all about how

[Sinfulsot]

I came across this totally by accident several years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since:The Glass, By Sharon Olds

other personal faves:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing like the Sun, by William "Budd" Shakespeare