Poetry hate in this board

[Anonymous No.14349002]

>aspires to be a writer
>is interested in literature
>hates poetry
I'd understand it if you are some normie tourist Plebbitor or an edgy zoomer faggot but any person seriously interested in literature or with writing aspirations should be interested in poetry. The love for words knows no form. Most if not all your favorite writers wrote poetry initially. I'm talking about Joyce, Borges, Houellebecq, Bolaño, Faulkner, and others. Some succeeded at it, some failed, some did alright. Faulkner famously said that he was a failed poet. And those writers who never tried it read it instead. Where does the title for McCarthy's No Country for Old Men come from? From a poem by Yeats. If literature is so shit these days, one of the factors is that newer writers simply dismiss poetry. I don't think they'll get anywhere. Poetry is the closest thing to magic that we have in literature.

[Anonymous No.14349016]

Good post but you're still a frogposter OP

[Anonymous No.14349029]

>>14349002
What's your stance on free verse?

[Anonymous No.14349033]

>wellbeck
>favorite writer

AHUEHUEHUEHUE

[Anonymous No.14349048]

>>14349033
He is a favorite of many people in this board. I wasn't necessarily talking about you.

[Anonymous No.14349076]

btw Nabokov also wrote poetry (and failed like his loathed Faulkner.)

[Anonymous No.14349085]

>>14349002
I hold poets in high-esteem but I sincerely do not understand it. I've had like three teachers explain Shakespeare's scansion and meter and even anons on here broke it down to me but I just don't hear it. I especially have no idea how epics are poems. Most of those just seem like novels with different line breaks to me, maybe it's because of the language barrier but I feel the same way about Milton and Spenser.

[Anonymous No.14349180]

>>14349085
Just learn the difference between stressed and unstressed, vocalize it if it helps

[Anonymous No.14349218]

>>14349085

Give me any line from Shakespeare that you don't understand and I promise I can explain it to you. Both metre and meaning.

[Anonymous No.14349231]

>>14349085
Poetry is more like memes where it's more abstract and made to invade your consciousness and influence your thoughts rather than using straight up logic and reasoning to illustrate your point.

[Anonymous No.14349328]

>>14349085
Part of the problem with Shakespeare is that many of the most monosyllabic words can be counted as long or short, so its scan doesn't always match its actual stress in speech. You also have to account for the changes in accentuation that have developed over the centuries.

[Anonymous No.14349336]

>>14349328
many of the *most* common

[Anonymous No.14349344]

>>14349328

I'm not sure I follow you. The stress we give to the monosyllables does depend on their position, but, ultimately, a line of Shakespeare does virtually always scan and can be read out loud in an according manner. Can you provide an example of what you mean?

The words which take a different accent can also be intuited from the context of the metre, although I presume you already know that.

[Anonymous No.14349367]

I'm trying to write a poem for this school project thing the English department is doing
I've seen other students poems who I believe are also participating, and they're always free verse. I have very very little experience writing, but I want to write at least with a rhyme scheme. Then when i try and think of a meter, everything gets fucked trying to fit every line to be a certain amount of syllables, it's difficult

[Anonymous No.14349435]

>>14349344
>can be read out loud in an according manner
You're right, I should have made it clear I was talking about typical speech, not performance speech.

[Anonymous No.14349445]

>>14349344
I think he was talking about Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation (commonly knwn as OP).

[Anonymous No.14349454]

>>14349435

I'm still not sure I understand your point. Do you have any example-lines to provide which would sound differently out loud from the scansion in a natural manner of speaking?

>>14349445

The words with obsolete accents should also be pronounced correctly even in RP.

[Anonymous No.14349515]

>>14349454
Line 13 from Act IV, Scene 1 of Hamlet
>It had been so with us had we been there

If I were to read this as though we were conversing normally, I would glide right over the "we" even though it is in a stressed position. In this video at 0:48 you can clearly hear the actor stress the word, which sounds a little unnatural to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ05qY_hYkA

[Anonymous No.14349552]

>>14349029
Not OP. Free verse certainly has its place (see e.g., Whitman) but it's been egregiously overused in the 21st century. Nu-"poets" almost exclusively write in it because they are too myopic, lazy, or uneducated to write with meter when it would improve the quality of the poem, and the bugmen that read their "poetry" don't care because even if they did understand meter, all they'd care about is the simplicity/absence of nuance and complexity and the trend.

[Anonymous No.14349565]

>>14349515

Thank you for providing the example and the video. In my opinion, the "we" is in a stressed position with good reason, because it provides a contrast with the old man whom Hamlet is said to have killed. It is the same as if you were to pronounce a sentence like:

"_They_ didn't want to go, but _we_ did, so we went."

If I re-write the sentence into modern English, the pronouns still take the stress:

Gertrude: In a deranged state of mind, Hamlet killed a poor old man.

Claudius: "If _we'd_ happened to be there also, the same thing would have happened to _us_!""

[Anonymous No.14349647]

>>14349565
Okay, good answer.
But how about this one, just a bit further down at Line 20:
>We would not understand what was most fit

Here, the stress on "was" seems out of place (and I don't think the tense needs any emphasis).

[Anonymous No.14349674]

>>14349647

Modern actors tend to be so careless that they would often put the stress on such a feeble word as "was" here, but the way I'd scan those last two feet are as a trochee plus an iamb, which is a variation which we often find in iambic pentametre.

We WOULD / not UN/derSTAND/WHAT was/most FIT.

In other words, it is the natural reading of the words which actually leads us to the correct scansion, and not the other way about.

An analogy is Henry VIII, Act 4 Scene 2:

"My legs like loaden branches bow to th' earth."

i. e. "BOW to / the EARTH."

[Anonymous No.14349682]

>>14349647

Modern actors tend to be so careless that they would often put the stress on such a feeble word as "was" here, but the way I'd scan those last two feet is as a trochee plus an iamb, which is a variation which we often meet with in iambic pentametre.

We WOULD / not UN/derSTAND/WHAT was/most FIT.

In other words, it is the natural reading of the words which actually leads us to the correct scansion, and not the other way about.

An analogy is Henry VIII, Act 4 Scene 2:

"My legs like loaden branches bow to th' earth."

i. e. "BOW to / the EARTH."

[Anonymous No.14349744]

>>14349682
how can I learn about scansion and get good at it? I don't see how one determines what is stressed and what isn't? How do I read the poetry to find out?

[Anonymous No.14349812]

>>14349682
So in some cases the natural pronunciation informs the scansion, but in others the assumed scansion informs the pronunciation. Could you describe a set of principles that guide the application of these methods? I guess I'm basically asking the same question as this guy >>14349744.

[Anonymous No.14349868]

>>14349744

Personally, I didn't learn it from a book, and, unfortunately, I never found one written on this subject in a comprehensive manner. The popular ones are very basic. It is useful to get a general idea of what an iamb, a trochee, an anapaest, etc., is, and what common metres like iambic pentametre are supposed to be; but, beyond that, the only true way to understand metre is to exercise a great deal of thought and study on the texts themselves. Your own ear and taste, along with much experience, must be your guides. This is actually why I pressed this anonymous >>14349812 on the reading-out-loud point, because, to me, the best way to learn metre is to keep asking yourself "How ought this to be read out loud?" and finding the answer to that question. Scrutinize the classics, try to find out the variations in metres for yourself by actually speaking the words out loud, and look for analogies of those variations both within and between authors to confirm your conjectures. For example, the reason why I know that a trochee + an iamb is acceptable in iambic pentametre is that I not only find it in Shakespeare, but in every other writer who uses that metre; it is something I have observed for myself again and again. That then means that when I see a phrase like "what was most fit," and perceive that emphasizing "was" would be an absurdity, I know what to assume next, being able to provide hundreds of analogous cases (like the one from Henry VIII) to substantiate my assumption. Again, in another thread, there was somebody who mistakenly thought that in this line from Lord Byron:

"Fame, Wisdom, Love, and Power were mine"

"Power were mine" was an anapaest, and made for an irregularity in the metre. But I know from prior experience that the word "power" is often treated as monosyllabic in classic poetry, and so I can perceive immediately that the line is regular.

Fame, WIS/dom, LOVE,/ and POWR,/ were MINE.

[Anonymous No.14349875]

>>14349868
What do you think of this short video on Shakespeare's iambic pentameter? Does it get it right? https://youtu.be/I5lsuyUNu_4

[Anonymous No.14349884]

Based OP. I listen to Eminem and Outkast, mostly.

[Anonymous No.14349897]

>>14349875

That video is a good example of what I mean when I say all the things written on this subject are very basic, especially since it has nearly a million views. He explains what an iamb and a trochee are, and what a perfect line of iambic pentametre is, but he doesn't even go into the question of variations. In fact, he falsely scans the line:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" (timestamp 2:51)

as if "Shall I" were an iamb instead of a trochee, which is obviously absurd (Shall _I_ compare thee to a summer's day, as opposed to who else?).

[Anonymous No.14349926]

>>14349002
verse is liquor; prose water-downed beer.

[Anonymous No.14351000]

>>14349868
thank you so much. so it all comes down to practice. i've read about scansion, and as you say it's brief, and about the different types of metrical feet. all that's left is to study even more.

[Anonymous No.14351027]

was gonna make my own thread but since there's a poetry related thread already - anyone have patrician reccs for the greatest 21st century / current poets? Haven't read a lot of poetry outside of english classes but the stuff I've like is T.S. Elliott, Shelley, other romantics, and some of the imagists. Would prefer stuff that doesn't depend too much on classical allusions that I won't get.

[Anonymous No.14351077]

>>14351027
Houellebecq and Heaney come to mind.