I don’t know if this is a common experience, but I found that I didn’t really start to cultivate a proper appreciation for poetry until I began to try to translate foreign-language poetry. In high school, very few English-language poems appealed to me. When we began to translate Virgil in my Latin class, however(and especially when we translated Horace), I was properly enthralled. I think translation forces you to pay close attention to the language in a way that really aids the cultivation of an appreciation for poetry. It doesn’t hurt that Horace is simply a better poet than just about anyone we read in my English classes, of course.
For me, it was Chaucer. The antique, oddly-spelled language was much easier to understand when read aloud, so I read it aloud to myself, and it was only then that I heard it as music.
I also try to read poetry aloud when I can—I did that with translations of Beowulf and a couple Greek dramas last summer when I had a lot of time to laze about and read to myself, and I found that was very much the right way to go(I admit to also taking some amount of half-ironic pleasure in being the guy reciting Euripedes on the platform at the train station)
I think so much depends on school and how your English teacher conveyed things to you. My English teacher was Welsh and she'd get a tear in her eye when reciting Dylan Thomas poems to us. She transferred through her passion, eye, recitation, explanation and ear the poetry. She taught us the life stories of the poets. Thomas, Auden, Wordsworth, Hughes, Larkin. She obliged us to learn by heart two poems off a list she gave us - I can still recite Tyger, Tyger and I Am by John Clare off the top of my head.
So her education encapsulated so much more than the poems themselves. It was about what the poems meant in the lives of the poets and therefore what they could mean in our lives. I still think of her often. And the poems she taught us.
I would love to see what you do with Eliot’s “Prufrock”. I love it but when I try to understand the epigraph and the ending my mind feels contorted. Dr Chuck Spurgeon
Interesting pairing of Bishop and Herbert, Herbert being important to Bishop and an influence ("The Man-Moth"). In her letters she notes that she gave her students "Love Unknown" to study.
Esso eventually became Exxon, so you won't see the cans lined up that way anymore. Bishop says that the "so-so-so" is what you used to say to high-strung horses but feared that the reference was being lost even when she wrote the poem.
Thank you. I needed to stumble across that Herbert poem. And now I’m thinking how it sits side by side with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem here and how I like the way the last line of Filling Station sort of journeys towards Prayer (1)
When I was in school, I felt like they were feeding me little crumbs of poetry, but I wanted a whole loaf— actually I also wanted to learn how to bake the bread myself...
In the NYT AI quiz from a few months ago, the only selection where I chose the human excerpt was for poetry. I'm sure it helped quite a bit that the excerpt was from Elizabeth Bishop. I've found it easy and rewarding to inhabit her poems. This may partially because she shares biographical facts with part of my family.
I don’t know if this is a common experience, but I found that I didn’t really start to cultivate a proper appreciation for poetry until I began to try to translate foreign-language poetry. In high school, very few English-language poems appealed to me. When we began to translate Virgil in my Latin class, however(and especially when we translated Horace), I was properly enthralled. I think translation forces you to pay close attention to the language in a way that really aids the cultivation of an appreciation for poetry. It doesn’t hurt that Horace is simply a better poet than just about anyone we read in my English classes, of course.
For me, it was Chaucer. The antique, oddly-spelled language was much easier to understand when read aloud, so I read it aloud to myself, and it was only then that I heard it as music.
I also try to read poetry aloud when I can—I did that with translations of Beowulf and a couple Greek dramas last summer when I had a lot of time to laze about and read to myself, and I found that was very much the right way to go(I admit to also taking some amount of half-ironic pleasure in being the guy reciting Euripedes on the platform at the train station)
Loved the close read of the "Filling Station"!
I think so much depends on school and how your English teacher conveyed things to you. My English teacher was Welsh and she'd get a tear in her eye when reciting Dylan Thomas poems to us. She transferred through her passion, eye, recitation, explanation and ear the poetry. She taught us the life stories of the poets. Thomas, Auden, Wordsworth, Hughes, Larkin. She obliged us to learn by heart two poems off a list she gave us - I can still recite Tyger, Tyger and I Am by John Clare off the top of my head.
So her education encapsulated so much more than the poems themselves. It was about what the poems meant in the lives of the poets and therefore what they could mean in our lives. I still think of her often. And the poems she taught us.
“The Filling Station” was poetry in pictorial motion to me. I also found it quite funny.
“We must let the poem teach us how to read it.”
I read it as ironically hilarious.
*******
“The soul can only be paraphrased”
Can something be paraphrased that cannot first be phrased?
I would love to see what you do with Eliot’s “Prufrock”. I love it but when I try to understand the epigraph and the ending my mind feels contorted. Dr Chuck Spurgeon
Interesting pairing of Bishop and Herbert, Herbert being important to Bishop and an influence ("The Man-Moth"). In her letters she notes that she gave her students "Love Unknown" to study.
Esso eventually became Exxon, so you won't see the cans lined up that way anymore. Bishop says that the "so-so-so" is what you used to say to high-strung horses but feared that the reference was being lost even when she wrote the poem.
Thank you. I needed to stumble across that Herbert poem. And now I’m thinking how it sits side by side with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem here and how I like the way the last line of Filling Station sort of journeys towards Prayer (1)
When I was in school, I felt like they were feeding me little crumbs of poetry, but I wanted a whole loaf— actually I also wanted to learn how to bake the bread myself...
How about this one about a young woman falling for an old man?
Delicious Decay
When my love and I first met
my life had reached its medlar moment,
or the ripeness of a quince or persimmon.
I say this because I had begun to blet,
just like those fruits when ready to eat:
lightly bruised and showing signs of rot.
Unperturbed by appearances or differences
in age, I was very much to her taste.
She fancied me rotten, as they used to say
in jest, and stepped up to take a bite.
It has been my good fortune to be consumed
in this lay communion every day since then.
T.S. Eliot comes to mind: „genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.“
In the NYT AI quiz from a few months ago, the only selection where I chose the human excerpt was for poetry. I'm sure it helped quite a bit that the excerpt was from Elizabeth Bishop. I've found it easy and rewarding to inhabit her poems. This may partially because she shares biographical facts with part of my family.