Poetry

Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
It's hard to say how contrived it was, the whole thing of him getting opiumed up off his face, nodding off, having this visionary dream and then only remembering a fragment of it, but the result doesn't feel contrived even if it was, it rings true to me.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
jenks said:
Somewhere on one of these threads we talked about Frost at Midnight by STC it’s one of my favourites.
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William Wordsworth Wanders Lonely

I guess I feel that if I have to ask the question I'm not getting the intended effect from it. I'm missing something.
dissensus.com

I love it too, it came up in the Prynne thread too as an influence on his poem Sun Set 4 • 56

He doesn't seem to have more than a handful of great poems which is a shame, but maybe his later critical/philosophical writings will be worth checking out?

I'm gonna read Christabel and Dejection: An ode next cos I have them in an anthology.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
After reading Kubla Khan I get the impression that Coleridge, though they were probably fairly evenly matched in talent, was able to take his imagination to even more far out places than Wordsworth cos of the drugs, but it was necessarily more fragmentary and unsustainable, hence the smaller number of great poems.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of technique rather than craft. Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in Yeats’s phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into ‘an idea, something intended, complete.’
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Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
DH Lawrence Snake raaaaaar best poem ever! I first read it 25 years ago when I was at school and had forgot all about it. Medlars and Sorb-apples is amazing too, definitely need to read more Lawrence.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Can see why they put it on a GCSE or A level syllabus cos it's so easy, anyone could get into it, but you can't knock it.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Speaking of Hughes, I stuck on his "Tales from Ovid" audiobook the other night and listened to "Achteaon", absolutely fantastic
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I'm definitely not anti-Hughes, I used to really like Crow when I was younger, and I think he's better than Plath (don't get what the fuss is about, seems really dated now) but Lawrence is much more powerful I reckon. I think I made the mistake of trying to read Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley when I was younger and got really bored so I dismissed him. Maybe I'd like the novels more now I'm older, I dunno but I hated them back then.

Can't knock Ship of Death either.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Speaking of Hughes, I stuck on his "Tales from Ovid" audiobook the other night and listened to "Achteaon", absolutely fantastic
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Read a few bits of Arthur Golding's translation of metamorphoses and they were superb (big Shakespeare influence) but I'm a bit put off by the idea of more modern translations for some reason. I know all translations do to some extent, but doesn't Hughes take massive liberties with the original stories? That sort of puts me off.
 
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