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poem about the tiger
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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That's better poetry than 95% of what i read (which admittedly isn't very much)
I'm an English grad. A whole lot of the poetry sections of my upper division courses involved insufferably bleak and pretentious crap (don't get me started about The Waste Land and the author of it being such a
that he bragged on his deathbed that people still didn't understand it, as a final flex). I happened to really love Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems which made me a bit of a pariah sometimes because he committed heresy such as things rhyming sometimes, or the poem being actually understood by most readers, that sort of thing.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner fucking slaps. It's like late 1700s metal.
Kubla Khan doesn't count when it comes to the "easy to understand" thing. The poet was tripping balls while writing it and even he didn't know what it meant or where it was going.
Well to be fair a lot of historically famous poetry is shit too. Idk maybe they lost a lot in translation, but some don't i like Iliad and Odyssey for example. I find best historical poetry to be ancient Sumerian-Akkadian (and their epigones), they didn't give a fuck about million rules just created clear and easy to follow rhytm with repeating.
To be fair to poetry in general i started to hate it because the Polish romanticist nationalist poetry. There are FUCKTON of it, and they are even worse than all other romanticist poetry because it was the partition time and Poland didn't exist so you can imagine what those shitty chewed off noble druggie losers could write. Well they are some banger fragments like Mickiewicz apparently predicting socialism as saviour of Poland but mostly its shit but every kid in Poland since WW1 ended was tortured with that for years, and sadly PRL wasn't an exception.
I fully accept that; they're ponderous and repetitive in places, especially in higher fidelity attempts at translation. They were meant to be episodic, in a way, which means chorus recaps and the like.
I have some scorching hot takes on Shakespeare that got some
tier ableist slurs and death threats sent my way in the past so I'll keep those to myself. Even offline while in college, some Bardologists got pissed when I had anything to say but praise about him. There's a very real "in-group" clique that dominates humanities departments, and "Bardologist" was the watch word among the few, the damned, professors and students alike, that had anything negative to say about him.
Gilgamesh isn't just legendary because of its age; it's truly a great story and it hurts how much of it has been lost.
Well i meant i like iliad and Odyssey, Polish translations are very good imo.
I'm pretty mid on Shakespeare, he's ok, but my two most liked pieces are actually adaptations and a loose ones at that: Throne of Blood and Titus Andronicus (that with Hopkins). What i find funny about Shakespeare is that where i find quotes form him the most often, is the murican sci-fi slop books, they seem to think he's the absolute pinnacle of entire human culture.
Also fun fact, his name is easily translatable into Polish: Wilhelm Trzęsidzida
I misunderstood you, then. My mistake. I'm a big enjoyer of both myself. I even somewhat like the glorified Roman fanfiction of the Odyssey that was the Aneid.
That's my biggest beef too: lots of knee-jerk "by quoting this ribald pro-Tudor propaganda I am suddenly the largest galaxy of brains" collective hype that somehow bled back into the humanities departments to the point of actively ignoring Shakespeare's contemporaries (including those he appropriated from). That's not even going into the
side of things that such departments also try to sweep under the rug if they're so much as asked about in class.
I'm not saying Shakespeare had no value or significance for modern English in its nascent development period; far from it. I'm not saying Shakespeare didn't have great significance in western civilization, which obviously he did. My issue is the knee-jerk uncritical worship even for some plays that were more or less Michael Bay movies of the Renaissance, crude patriotism gestures and pandering fanservice alike (oh and nonce references/humor, also very Bay)
Awesome!
I also know his name translates well from the original Klingon as Wil'yam Sheq'spir.
Oh come-on, he was more of a Tarantino. Remixer of other more artistic playwrights to make mass culture.
Also equally purient and into the lowbrow. Which is part of why he's notable, he was the first real "pop" culture that was made for all classes, rather than just either aristocracy or peasants/tradesmen (i.e. medieval cycle dramas were for the later, the poetry the former).
I do value and appreciate that, though I have strong opinions about how much of Shakespeare's pandering to the regime that financed his work was taken as some sort of self-evident historical fact in his so-called historical plays. The most notorious example was his portrayal of Richard III, making him a sort of "too strong and too weak" caricature villain (hunchback optional) that downplayed the absolute monster in battle that dueled, and killed, all but the last of the Tudors would-be kings that went out to kill him, one after the other.
Oh yeah the regime propaganda is an issue, and we can never fully "absolve" any artist of the time for their monarchist propaganda.
Of course Dollimore's Radical Tragedy is a good thing to keep in mind here - thanks to the existence of the state censor, the degree one could radically oppose monarchy was circumscribed by the conditions of artistic production. You can do a Richard II and present Bolingbroke as politicking (casting doubt on Tudor and later Stuart ideology about divine right in the process), but unfortunately the peasant uprisings are always dealt as if they are beyond the pale and the most you might get is some good rhetoric from their leaders.
But we can't forget this was all produced under a state censor (indeed we should emphasize it!) since it shows the limits of imagination imposed on Shakespeare, and if you're into his "genius" then you can point to the radical elements he did include in spite of this regime.
However I really don't think he's more than a great mixtape artist, mashing up good bits in pleasing ways. He was an artist for the people, and that's the thing worth celebrating.
It was one thing to vaguely hail the proverbial king and the other to say "the now-dead enemies of the reigning dynasty were the soyjak, and the reigning dynasty, as you see, are the chads."
I could be tempted to go hard on the opportunity he had to solidify the humanization of Shylock and the injustice he faced but no that was a comedy and yes audiences of his time thought it was joyous that Shylock lost his livelihood and his daughter was converted and married to the man that ruined him and basically removed from his family but later interpretations and presentations did that for him because he was more than fine with that status quo by the accounts I've seen.
That's actually my take too. He was definitive for his time, a trendsetter and trailblazer in both language and theatrics and few individuals had as much direct influence on the cultures they lived in, but fuck the Bardology
that simultaneously dominate humanities colleges and also make average tryhards quote Shakespeare as a shortcut to presenting as smart.
I assume you've read Marlowe's Jew of Malta, at once 1000x more horrible but also more radical since it's a tragedy and not a comedy.
And yeah bardolotry is cringe and I feel ppl that actually study Shakey nowadays are way less prone to it (though it's still there). If nothing else, there's a deep Marxist tradition in the academy now that pushes back on great man theory.
Say what you will about the new historicisists, they gave us that at least
On a side note I could also rant about the Sonnets that are pretty much out and out negs of Shakespeare's child actors that he was creeping upon, in some cases mocking their breath, their disappointing appearances, but settling on noncing with them anyway. Bardologists hate when that gets brought up.
This reminds me that the few times I've seen historians earnestly talk about all the "lost epics" of the expanded Iliad poetic universe have been very funny, because at their bluntest they're just sort of hemming and hawing around a point that's basically "so it was all just a big fanfic scene, really, and a lot of it was bad, and it represented a bunch of different contradictory canons, and like every character no one even liked got a spinoff epic about them getting lunch that one time... So really it seems the two books we do have seem to be what were considered the best, and certainly were the most popular of all them which is why any copies survived at all."
Like obviously they'd still be really neat to have, but it's really funny to think about how this big chunk of what's held up as one of the pillars of western literary culture was just like, the contemporary equivalent of a fanfic scene where everyone involved was just kind of making up their own stories about these mythic characters and some of it was popular enough to get repeated down the line and only two stories were popular enough to still be getting copied many centuries later.
It's distressing just how little remains of Sappho's poetry. She was legendary, even in antiquity, and we have nearly nothing left of her work.
Yeah. I still remember learning that when I was in high school and being confused at how there was just so little left of someone I was at the same time being told was so famous and prolific. I think that was one of the formative steps to realizing just how fragmentary even the most famous bits of history really are, because before that point everything I'd seen about antiquity was always presented with a sort of air of completeness and I never realized how often that vague summaries of a place or person or practice genuinely were the sum total of what's actually known about them.
Imagine if all we knew about Peter Jackson was the movie Bad Taste.
i'd respect him if that's all i knew of him
I admit the movie was pretty funny in a lowbrow way.
Hell yes it does. Also I think it inspired the Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists, which also slaps.
Coleridge slaps. Also Kubla Khan mercifly tells you that it's drug poetry right away, so it's easy to understand as the "fragment of a dream" or whatever he calls it.
I like the 17th century lyric poetry (Donne, Marvell, etc) though. Very intricate, but in an accessible way (just follow the complex sentence).
Evidently you're not the first person to think that.
If you want even earlier metal in poetry, check out Dream of the Rood.
It's an old Viking-adjacent take on Christianity that suggests that Jesus rode his cross down to hell and battled the armies of hell to liberate everyone that died before he could save them.
Edit: ~~link was broke, spoiler removed~~
Yes. I also fixed the link.
Did you enjoy The Lighthouse? The killing of the seabird hits extra hard having read the Rime. Hark Triton.
It's a different era of poetry altogether, but some proper old English poetry has made me feel wistful in a way that no other poetry really ever has. I recommend The Seafarer if you like Rime. I'd also recommend The Ruin, and The Wanderer. In all cases though I'd recommend contextualising them, and really trying to understand the weight of the things they're saying... about the hearth, and the halls, and how it relates to Christianity at the time and all that. For some reason it really just hits me in the gut. The Ruin is probably the easiest to 'get' without any context.
I think Tolkien might even have been the author of some of the most popular translations of those texts.
I'm familiar with most of those, and yes, they have a heavy weight on some readers much like the cold briny seabreeze blowing upon a stranded sailor.
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
...
As soon as I read "STORM-BLAST" the first time, I knew that shit was metal