Just finished this, felt like i understood absolutely nothing. I haven't read a lot of poetry before this but still decided to read this. Perhaps I should reread after getting into poetry a bit more?
The Wasteland
Just finished this, felt like i understood absolutely nothing. I haven't read a lot of poetry before this but still decided to read this. Perhaps I should reread after getting into poetry a bit more?
More like The Waste of Time
Read it again but louder this time.
I did.
Alright I'll try Prufrock, thanks.
I will read Prufrock then and try out some of the Romantics in the meantime, thank you.
it’s dry, obscurantist and reference-heavy.
Try Prufrock instead
If you really want to read TS Eliot, then Prufrock is a much, much better starting place. But really, yes, he isn't the best starting place. The Romantics (Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake, etc.) and Victorian (GM Hopkins, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, etc.) era poets (o Whitman too) are much better for that. Then you both go back in time to Shakespeare and the Greeks and Pope and Milton and forward in time to the easier 20th century poets like Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, WH Auden, etc. before I'd recommend Eliot.
But really it's not necessarily a video game with clearcut progressions. Maybe you read TS Eliot tomorrow and it really vibes with you, yknow? And any specific questions you can always look up on the internet or ask here. But yes, for sure Prufrock before The Waste Land.
>But really, yes, he isn't the best starting place. The Romantics (Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake, etc.) and Victorian (GM Hopkins, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, etc.) era poets (o Whitman too) are much better for that.
Based. I don't know what it is about the Romantic era that makes even the normiest of normies appreciate it (without losing any of its aesthetic quality) but I pray to God we see another period like it before the world explodes.
It's just more recent and closer to our own sensibilities - the normies who like it had their psyches indirectly and unconsciously molded by those very works, so it is a return to what's familiar for them.
Are you reading it with Eliot's notes?
It's a different thing. A book is like a movie, a poem is like a song or a painting.
Yes i look through the notes when rereading.
Prufrock is great but I also read Portrait of a Lady, which i liked the best.
>Yes i look through the notes when rereading.
Well that should clue you in as to why it's hard to understand, it's extremely referential. Not made for newer readers. I certainly didn't understand shit when I first read it, just liked some of the phrases and images.
lovecraft's mocking parody is profoundly more enjoyable
Parodies are such cheap gimmicks. Disgusting, really. And this is not even good. No where near the skill level of the original poem.
I agree. The Waste Land is a wonderful poem. Visionary. Nothing is so representative
On the other hand I don't like Prufrock at all.
why do you dislike Prufrock?
Maybe because of its world-weariness in an especially concentrated form. I have rarely, and I wouldn’t ever want to, identify with its opening lines:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
(CS Lewis said this)
In general I don’t like Eliot’s sensibility, which was very different from Pound’s which I like a lot. But I found The Wasteland uniquely captivating, especially the second stanza
Depression is only good in literature if its full of vitality (like Hamlet).
> Disgusting, really. And this is not even good. No where near the skill level of the original poem.
True. And that a weak, crappy parody of T.S. Eliot is still the best poem Lovecraft ever wrote, makes it all the funnier.
Yes. You should start more simply. I have often described The Waste Land as Eliot's having a laugh by flexin' on plebs. De-plebify, anon! Purge yourself, you scoundrel! If you haven't run your laps, how can you race in a marathon?
Poetry never really hits me like boooks and I want to change that so where do I start?
Are you an emotionally sensitive person in general? Do you like music? You can't force emotion so its hard to say where to start, but being more comfortable with the form will make you more amenable to being effected. So just exposure. Modern people are alienated from verse form for whatever (technological?) reason. But great prose and great poetry are the same thing at the end of the day
For me, it was studying grammar and meter. Narrative/dramatic poems were also much more digestible at the start than lyric.
>Modern people are alienated from verse form for whatever (technological?) reason
I hypothesize it's due to a combination of form getting progressively more both esoteric and neglected by poets since the mid-1800s and poetry not being taught in primary school anymore.
here:
Glad you enjoyed it! I've got multiple parts of it committed to memory, the music and imagery of it is really outstanding.
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws,
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.'
I just completed Prufrock. It was rather nice, I actually felt like I came out of it understanding what he was talking about. The poem evoked some nice imagery in my head. I especially liked picrel.
you might not have understood everything, but if you aren't getting at least a general idea of what's happening you weren't paying attention.
To you, is TS Eliot a part of US lit, or English (country) lit?
I saw Eliot in an English lit course.
I took him in America. Same thing with Coleridge who is not American.
From what little I have read of his, he definitely seems more English.
>I haven't read a lot of poetry before this but still decided to read this
As other anons have already pointed out the romantics and Shakespeare would be a better starting point. You kinda need poetrybrain to understand modernism, which you were either born with or you need to develop it by reading more.
It’s the Finnegans Wake of poetry. You don’t read it in one shot or without annotations and just get it.