Originally posted by BlueMageOne
Yes it is EE Cummings
No its not. Its “ee cummings.” He never capitalized.
Of course, that doesn’t hide that he is a bad writer.
Oh cool it Sil. It was obviously a typo- you don’t need to act like an angsty ass about it.
it was to show that i have atleast a general understanding of what im talking about, which is being made to appear otherwise. youre acting like that was my entire post, rather than an addendum to the tail end.
There are other ways to go about showing you know something.
Eh, i like ee cummings a lot, mostly because of his crazy writing style, and lack of proper spacing. As I see it, not all poems should be so and so amount of lines and about love.
Thats why I like classic american writers so much, they stepped out of the traditional bounds of poetry and story writing and created their own nitch.
Edit: Saying Walt “sucks” and most american writing is “bullshit” doesn’t make it sound like you know much about either, which is why i got a little angry…
Well, Sil, honestly I’d say most WRITING is bullshit.
You live in America, and therefore are exposed to much more American Literature than, say, someone in Britain. There is just as much bullshit there as here. There is bullshit everywhere, you can’t avoid it. Sorry to disappoint you.
Yeah, there is bullshit everywhere, more in america, but you’d be suprized how much bullshit there is in Europe too (i wouldn’t say England is still all Tea partys after all).
There are still people who can avoid all this bullshit and write really great art.
I woulnd’t say most writing is bullshit, but some it. If it was, we would have a hell of a lot more poems and books about people’s love for big macs and nike shoes.
Most good English poetry is from pre-20th century England. Good free verse exists, but it’s relatively rare. My poetry book explains the topic well.
A lot of people take the term free verse literally, with the result that there is more bad free verse written today than one can easily shake a stick at. Most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is better than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than there appearances; as well as that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were war criminals, that the C.I.A. is a menace, that corporations are corrupt, that contemporary history seems “entropic,” and that women get a dirty deal. All very true and welcome. Yet what is lamentably missing is the art that makes poems re-readable once we have fathomed what they say.
T.S. Eliot said, “The ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras of even the ‘freest’ verse.” That is, free verse’s effectiveness depends on how it deviates from traditional meter. A poem that does not take advantage of that deviation, that is arranged however the poet feels when writing it, is half-prose with line breaks. Not everything that Whitman wrote was brilliant, and I think Walt Whitman A Kosmos is fair evidence of that.
Xwing1056
With a country so big as USA, and Canada too, there is bound to be a lot of crappy authors. But there will always be some golden drops among the sand, as people have already said. For the course I also read Emily Dickinsson and some random American poets, and Walt Whitman A Kosmos was the only one I got irritated at. His O Captain! My Captain! and I Hear America Singing were very nice, on the other hand.
@_@ ouch. I don’t even wanna think about what that means. I do too many literary analysis already.
Originally posted by Xwing1056
Most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is better than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than there appearances;
That’s very lit-critic of that book, but that’s what most rhyming poetry is about, too. As for free verse, the good kind generally has some kind of creative imagery or eloquent wording behind it. To the best of my knowledge, no poem by Archibald Ammons has any rhyme scheme whatsoever, and I’ve been unable to find any scansion whatsoever in many of them, but that doesn’t change the fact that almost all of them are at least intriguing, and many are absolutely beautiful in their evocations of nature. Sure, I’ll grant, if you’d like, that “most” free verse is composed because the writer lacks the technical skill to rhyme or the creativity to do anything original, but the “most of it sucks” argument applies across the board to literature, painting, rhyming poetry, the whole lot.
Originally posted by Sephiroth Katana
Sure, I’ll grant, if you’d like, that “most” free verse is composed because the writer lacks the technical skill to rhyme or the creativity to do anything original, but the “most of it sucks” argument applies across the board to literature, painting, rhyming poetry, the whole lot.
And let us not forget pop music. wink
Oh yes, let us forget pop music, BY GOD!
Originally posted by Dark Paladin
Where was Jules Vernes from?
La belle France.
Obviously, what one considers ‘good’ literature is all a matter of worldview. I cannot declare that I find Whitman’s poetry to be that enthralling, although it is a noteworthy piece of literature. Still, I try to keep an open mind when I approach art as a whole.
My tastes, however, still favour highly-structured poetry over free verse, because I believe that it allows for greater creative expression, through manipulation of diction and metre. Furthermore, whilst American literature does boast some remarkable achievements, I have found European and Asian literature to be more emotionally/spiritually/politically/morally enriching.
One should nevertheless not lapse into the fallacy that complicated poetry is always better than simple poetry.
Originally posted by Sephiroth Katana
That’s very lit-critic of that book, but that’s what most rhyming poetry is about, too. As for free verse, the good kind generally has some kind of creative imagery or eloquent wording behind it. To the best of my knowledge, no poem by Archibald Ammons has any rhyme scheme whatsoever, and I’ve been unable to find any scansion whatsoever in many of them, but that doesn’t change the fact that almost all of them are at least intriguing, and many are absolutely beautiful in their evocations of nature.
Rhyming poetry? Most traditional (accentual-syllabic) poetry is in blank verse, which does not rhyme. Moreover, free verse sometimes uses rhyme, if not as frequently.
Eloquence is critical to free verse, but how is ‘eloquence’ defined? Eloquent wording is eloquent because of how it sounds, which depends on which syllables are accented and unaccented. Meter is the way a poem sounds, insofar as results from its accents and syllables. A poet can ignore meter, but then his poems will merely have bad meter. He would be failing to take advantage of a key element in poetry.
Ammons’ poems are hard to scan, but meter is a critical part of their effect. For example, his Mansion begins like this:
So it came time
for me to cede myself
and I chose
the wind
to be delivered to
There’s no measurable meter, but notice that in first line there are three consecutive stresses. What if lines one and two instead read, “So the time arrived / for me to cede myself”? It works, but it no longer sounds distinctly good. Certainly, Ammons recognized “it came time” as the metrically superior option. His poetry relies heavily on his metrical awareness.
Sure, I’ll grant, if you’d like, that “most” free verse is composed because the writer lacks the technical skill to rhyme or the creativity to do anything original, but the “most of it sucks” argument applies across the board to literature, painting, rhyming poetry, the whole lot.
Naturally true, but incompetence is especially frequent in free verse. Poets who are mistaken that meter has no bearing on free verse are doomed to produce ineffectual poetry.
Xwing1056
“Rhyming poetry? Most traditional (accentual-syllabic) poetry is in blank verse, which does not rhyme. Moreover, free verse sometimes uses rhyme, if not as frequently.”
Yes, of course. Blank verse is still formally and rigourously defined, though, if I remember correctly. That’s what I should have said instead of “rhyming”; I was probably thinking of sonnets or other kinds of poems that are both rhyming and rigourously defined.
“Eloquence is critical to free verse, but how is ‘eloquence’ defined? Eloquent wording is eloquent because of how it sounds, which depends on which syllables are accented and unaccented.”
Indeed. What I had in mind when I said “eloquence” was akin to the “creative imagery” thing - an eloquent poem would create a very vivid, stirring image, perhaps due to the specific vocabulary it used. The question this raises, of course, is whether that specific vocabulary wouldn’t just derive its vividness mainly from the accenting of its syllables, and it may well do just that.
“Meter is the way a poem sounds, insofar as results from its accents and syllables. A poet can ignore meter, but then his poems will merely have bad meter. He would be failing to take advantage of a key element in poetry.”
Oh, of course. I agree with this, but it’s akin to saying, basically, “poems derive their effect from how they sound and how words in them are chosen,” which is self-evident. Any minimally competent poet would concern himself with the sound and wording of his poem to some degree. As your Ammons example shows, a formally defined, “measurable” meter is not a requirement, which is really all I was driving at.
“Ammons’ poems are hard to scan, but meter is a critical part of their effect.”
Yeah, your observation here is very true. “So it came time” does sound more forceful and laconic, but that’s basically the same thing as what you said. I have to compliment you if you’re an Ammons fan, by the way.