The Waste Land was published in what year? Not a lot of end rhyme. What year Dulce et decorum est? End rhyme all the way through. Two years separate them. So much Depends by William Carlos Williams - a year after Waste Land, and a completely different paradigm. English poetry was in great flux in the post-Great-War years.
Going back to an earlier comment about prayer at the inauguration. They first seem to have shown up in Franklin Roosevelt's second inauguration in 1937.
...
To know that he was not a unit, a pawn whose place can be filled;
Not blood, but the beautiful years of his coming life have been spilled,
The days that should have followed, a house and a home, maybe,
For a thousand may love and marry and nest, but so shall not he.
... from 1914 F. Békássy
A-S poetic form doubtless formed by being bawled, from memory, over hall full of noshing thanes.
I cannot remember from my degree course any non-white, non-European (or even non-British*) authors and precious few female - Austen, Woolf, Eliot, Brontës about it. Leavis was Holy Writ.
All it takes is one good teacher, I have been thinking about this all morning.
We had a substitute teacher who had come down from Lagos and was very prim and English. She came into the class and told us to listen, then read a few lines from Muriel Rukeyser and we sat there too startled to speak.
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
Then she asked us to write down 10 words we associated with the Chimurenga war taking place in our country at that time. And another 10 words for 'more or less insane'. In those years the newspapers were heavily censored and we couldn't get news from them. All we heard on radio or saw on the b/w television were advertisements because there were no detailed news broadcasts unless the government made an announcement. We all sat around talking about that poem long after the class had ended.
Our teacher read more of the poem the following week and this time we listened even harder. When she got to the last few lines of the poem and looked up to see us all staring at her, she choked up a little and had to repeat the ending.
We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
All it takes is one good teacher, I have been thinking about this all morning.
My experience with poetry is that you're better off avoiding teachers all together. Every poetry class I had infused poems with life the way a biology class infuses frogs with life. But sharing poetry, preferably by reading them aloud while also sharing some wine or a joint as age or temperament dictate, will allow you to delight in the experience without having to turn it into a soul-killing eight-page essay with the appropriate number of footnotes. Not every valuable experience is meant to be institutionalized, as Peter learned at the transfiguration.
The Waste Land was published in what year? Not a lot of end rhyme. What year Dulce et decorum est? End rhyme all the way through. Two years separate them.
Most poets between Shakespeare and Eliot have written in blank verse; it would be easier to list big names that didn't.
Whitman's innovation would be discarding metre. That said, you could point to the Psalms in the KJV version, or to Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb (e.g. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.)
Unless I misheard it, 'The Hill we climb' does contain rhymes, but they aren't at regular intervals.
I've two quibbles with it. The first is that it's difficult to relate to other peoples' patriotic rhetoric. That, though, should makes one realise how odd one own country's is. The other is that it's a bit like Swinburne - sounds great but doesn't actually say very much.
I think rap uses internal rhyme, within the line, also assonance, (vowel rhyme), plus consonance, and other stuff, which can get complex, "I define my place as homeostasis, with chromeo bass riffs, and homey don't play this", (Jean Grae).
A teacher can be helpful for sparking the initial fire for poetry, but it really needs to be sustained by one's own reading and exploration, of course. The poetry world is quite wide and varied, and there's a lot that one won't come across in a classroom setting.
The Waste Land was published in what year? Not a lot of end rhyme. What year Dulce et decorum est? End rhyme all the way through. Two years separate them.
Most poets between Shakespeare and Eliot have written in blank verse; it would be easier to list big names that didn't.
Whitman's innovation would be discarding metre. That said, you could point to the Psalms in the KJV version, or to Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb (e.g. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.)
By this you mean they sometimes wrote in blank verse? Because plenty of those same poets made frequent use of rhyme as well.
The text version is here. It is full of internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and rhythm, as slam poetry often is. If people aren't familiar with performance poetry, you can also google 'slam poetry' and find all sorts on youtube to give you a context. Here is an article with links to five performances from slam poets.
This article might be of interest - it talks about this kind of poetry and gives the perspective of some young British poets.
A teacher can be helpful for sparking the initial fire for poetry, but it really needs to be sustained by one's own reading and exploration, of course. The poetry world is quite wide and varied, and there's a lot that one won't come across in a classroom setting.
The Waste Land was published in what year? Not a lot of end rhyme. What year Dulce et decorum est? End rhyme all the way through. Two years separate them.
Most poets between Shakespeare and Eliot have written in blank verse; it would be easier to list big names that didn't.
Whitman's innovation would be discarding metre. That said, you could point to the Psalms in the KJV version, or to Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb (e.g. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.)
By this you mean they sometimes wrote in blank verse? Because plenty of those same poets made frequent use of rhyme as well.
'Have written in blank verse' doesn't need a 'sometimes'. 'Have written' implies this, especially in the context of the whole discussion about blank verse versus rhyming poetry. Very different from 'always wrote'.
I have gone on holiday to Greece. I have eaten Greek salad. This hardly implies that all my holidays are in Greece, or that Greek salad is all I eat.
I tend to think assumptions that poetry should rhyme have nothing to do with the canon (which I believe is what Dafyd was saying too, if I understand correctly) and are more to do with the fact that many people haven't studied poetry in any depth, and are mostly familiar with the light-hearted rhyming poetry you get introduced to at school when you're a kid. Colonel Fazackerly, The King's Breakfast, and Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies, and such.
Was Martin Luther King's vision poetry or prose? What do I care? It was arresting then and still retains its power. I see "The Hill We Climb" in that tradition. Indeed, in many ways the poem is derived from it: a pupil's tribute to the master. I guess my question would be whether it and adds to that original, is more than a restatement, transcendent. My abiding memory, however, will not be the verse itself but the powerful decor and presence of the messenger. The medium was the message, if ever that contention was true.
A teacher can be helpful for sparking the initial fire for poetry, but it really needs to be sustained by one's own reading and exploration, of course. The poetry world is quite wide and varied, and there's a lot that one won't come across in a classroom setting.
The Waste Land was published in what year? Not a lot of end rhyme. What year Dulce et decorum est? End rhyme all the way through. Two years separate them.
Most poets between Shakespeare and Eliot have written in blank verse; it would be easier to list big names that didn't.
Whitman's innovation would be discarding metre. That said, you could point to the Psalms in the KJV version, or to Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb (e.g. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.)
By this you mean they sometimes wrote in blank verse? Because plenty of those same poets made frequent use of rhyme as well.
'Have written in blank verse' doesn't need a 'sometimes'. 'Have written' implies this, especially in the context of the whole discussion about blank verse versus rhyming poetry. Very different from 'always wrote'.
I have gone on holiday to Greece. I have eaten Greek salad. This hardly implies that all my holidays are in Greece, or that Greek salad is all I eat.
Wow thanks for the grammar lesson. I was addressing Dafyd because I didn’t understand what point he was trying to make.
Was Martin Luther King's vision poetry or prose? What do I care? It was arresting then and still retains its power.
I think it matters if you see good poetry as having values that are distinct from the values of great rhetoric or oratory, and that are also not the same as stuff white men happen to like.
Poetry makes nothing happen, says Auden, ambiguously: he would be the first to say that one of Martin Luther King's speeches was worth any of his poems. But then one of King's speeches could be both oratory and poetry.
Comments
...
To know that he was not a unit, a pawn whose place can be filled;
Not blood, but the beautiful years of his coming life have been spilled,
The days that should have followed, a house and a home, maybe,
For a thousand may love and marry and nest, but so shall not he.
... from 1914 F. Békássy
Well, I've always tried to keep the dog far hence. That's friend to man. Or with his claws, he'll dig it up a-gan.
Indeed. With a certain fairly tight line structure.
I cannot remember from my degree course any non-white, non-European (or even non-British*) authors and precious few female - Austen, Woolf, Eliot, Brontës about it. Leavis was Holy Writ.
*bar Conrad.
We had a substitute teacher who had come down from Lagos and was very prim and English. She came into the class and told us to listen, then read a few lines from Muriel Rukeyser and we sat there too startled to speak.
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
Then she asked us to write down 10 words we associated with the Chimurenga war taking place in our country at that time. And another 10 words for 'more or less insane'. In those years the newspapers were heavily censored and we couldn't get news from them. All we heard on radio or saw on the b/w television were advertisements because there were no detailed news broadcasts unless the government made an announcement. We all sat around talking about that poem long after the class had ended.
Our teacher read more of the poem the following week and this time we listened even harder. When she got to the last few lines of the poem and looked up to see us all staring at her, she choked up a little and had to repeat the ending.
We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
My experience with poetry is that you're better off avoiding teachers all together. Every poetry class I had infused poems with life the way a biology class infuses frogs with life. But sharing poetry, preferably by reading them aloud while also sharing some wine or a joint as age or temperament dictate, will allow you to delight in the experience without having to turn it into a soul-killing eight-page essay with the appropriate number of footnotes. Not every valuable experience is meant to be institutionalized, as Peter learned at the transfiguration.
Whitman's innovation would be discarding metre. That said, you could point to the Psalms in the KJV version, or to Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb (e.g. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.)
I've two quibbles with it. The first is that it's difficult to relate to other peoples' patriotic rhetoric. That, though, should makes one realise how odd one own country's is. The other is that it's a bit like Swinburne - sounds great but doesn't actually say very much.
By this you mean they sometimes wrote in blank verse? Because plenty of those same poets made frequent use of rhyme as well.
This article might be of interest - it talks about this kind of poetry and gives the perspective of some young British poets.
'Have written in blank verse' doesn't need a 'sometimes'. 'Have written' implies this, especially in the context of the whole discussion about blank verse versus rhyming poetry. Very different from 'always wrote'.
I have gone on holiday to Greece. I have eaten Greek salad. This hardly implies that all my holidays are in Greece, or that Greek salad is all I eat.
Wow thanks for the grammar lesson. I was addressing Dafyd because I didn’t understand what point he was trying to make.
Poetry makes nothing happen, says Auden, ambiguously: he would be the first to say that one of Martin Luther King's speeches was worth any of his poems. But then one of King's speeches could be both oratory and poetry.
Ha, I was about to say that!