What are some essential works of poetry for beginners? I just read leaves of grass and am craving more.
What are some essential works of poetry for beginners? I just read leaves of grass and am craving more.
What are some essential works of poetry for beginners? I just read leaves of grass and am craving more.
you can just end with Whitman. It doesn’t get any better than him
/thread
What is so good about Whitman? I like him but I also like meter and metaphors that you can understand without subscribing to specific politics
he was a gay pederast, like 90% of the male poets
Epic poetry.
Gottfried Benn
Read Wordsworth's Prelude (1805)
Poetry can be taken in any direction outside the titanic epics like Leaves of Grass, Divine Comedy, etc.
I recommend the Rape of The Lock by Pope. He's the dominating 18th century poet but is rarely discussed, and if you like this poem the rest of Pope is quite good too.
Here's some funny lines
See, fierce Belinda on the Baron flies,
with more than usual lightning in her eyes;
Nor feared the chief the unequal fight to try,
Who sought no more than on his foe to die.
Its a virgin who is literally trying to kill him and he can only think "Ah, how I wish to die while cumming inside her"
Thomas Hardy is underrated as a poet and very good for beginners
Robert Frost tends to be considered in the same ballpark of 'Great American Writers' as Whitman, I personally prefer Frost to Whitman as Whitman didn't really strike me.
Rainer Marie Rilke is also fantastic if you prefer that kind of pellucid prose.
I like Robert Hass' "Mating Dragonflies"
Get an anthology of poetry, almost any one but perhaps about pre-WW2 American poetry if you like Whitman, and flip through it at random (reading poetry collections front-to-back is generally a bad idea). If you like a poem, look up more by the author online. If you like them, order a collection of their works.
I don't know much about Whitman or American poetry I confess, but some starter poets most people like: Eliot (The Song of J Alfred Prufrock), Yeats (The Second Coming), Keats (When I have fears that I may cease to be),
Hölderlin is the only poet that really matters apart from the Greeks and Horace. You should also check out Heidegger’s essays on his hymns. There is also Rimbaud if you really want to
but you read them only in translation, ie you have never read them.
Maybe try some Larkin, or Dickinson? Nothing especially esoteric or unapproachable about them.
Is there any good collection of modern poetry? Are even there any good modern poems?
I always find myself reading romantic poetry, and want to try something a bit more modern than it.
Read Dylan Thomas.
If I can add my two cents, I'd say read Yeats or Eliot. You could start with any collection, or even a collected volume. Though, if I were to give a more personal recommendation, I'd say grab the Faber & Faber poetry essentials box set. Pay special attention to Heaney, Hughes, Plath, and Cope.
>and Cope
>all this anglospherian nonsence
Dude...
Mallarme, Rimbaud, Nekrasov, Tsvetaeva, Celan, Rilke and Sapho
Babby’s first entry-level poetry
I'm not an anti-translation autist but I get where people are coming from when they complain about poetry in translation. I usually try to read the translation along with the original, at least in the case of a longer work.
Yeah an anthology is a pretty important suggestion, OP, definitely good to read one sooner rather than later.
My contribution would be to say that you should consider focusing on a particular period or type of poetry: epic poems, Renaissance sonnets, Latin Golden Age, Romanticism, Modernism, French fin de siecle, English Victorians - maybe Transcendentalists like Whitman, though in the case of Emerson and Thoreau their poems are obviously overshadowed by their other writings.
Who would you suggest instead? And if entry-level means both very popular and very accessible, I can't imagine that applying to anyone there other than Rilke and Sappho - which is nothing at all against them either. Also of course you are a massive insufferable homosexual because the OP literally asked for entry-level poetry, so on that count alone your post is already subhuman, but you're also just plainly wrong.
what about Beat poetry?