Understanding poetry
Narrative and descriptive poems exemplifying the key elements are presented and analyzed.
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- Thanks for sharing, my own experience with poetry seems a similar once: once I am older it seems to make it more sense.
Reading "Understanding Poetry" by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks was also a big influence.
Also collecting anthologies has helped.
- Some books from a few different domains which may be of the type OP is asking for:
1. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric : Understanding the Nature and Function of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph.
2. Introduction to Logic by Irving Copi.
3. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Randall Bryant and others.
5. Prolog Programming by Ivan Bratko.
6. Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay
7. Geometry by Brennan.
8. Understanding Poetry by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brookes
- Getting a good text book like Cleanth Brookes/Robert Penn Warren "Understanding Poetry" would be the way I suggest to get into reading poetry.
Also getting a good anthology like Palgrave's or Anthony QuillerCouch, that covers a lot of poems and poets from different eras in small portable hand book format.
Personally the most enjoyment I get out of poetry is when I seen words and phrases that leap out to you in a surge of meaning and emotion.
Like for example, these fragments:
"Do more bewitch me than when art, is too precise in every part."
"A box where sweets compacted lie,"
"Thus, though we cannot make our sun,Stand still, yet we will make him run."
"Two paradises 'twere in one, To live in Paradise alone."
"O Grave! Where is thy victory? O death! Where is thy sting?"
"There is a Book by seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light"
"And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."
- I would recommend 'Understanding Poetry' by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as a good introduction, it also includes a reasonable collection of poems from various poets to appreciate.
I would also suggest getting an anthology like 'The Golden Treasury' or Anthony Quiller-Couch or Robert Penn Warren (Six Centuries of British Poetry) or G B Harrison. They are available often in small pocket editions, which one can carry around with one.
- May be you could try it once again, I found that I couldn't get it too while I was younger.
The work that greatly helped me to appreciate poetry better was, "Understanding Poetry" by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brookes.
- > The few beautiful parts that you can't not like is indeed Mozart, but the rest is not.
This strikes me as a bit too much in the vein of Pritchard's Understanding Poetry [1]. Sussmyer et al are not in Mozart's league for sure but the notion (and I'm exaggerating here not trying to straw man you) that near every note he wrote is false and everthing Mozart touched is gold is also a bit silly [2].
[1] Featured in a memorable scene in Dead Poets Society, If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great.
[2] again and again scholars have rationalized why this or that bit of the piece was “inferior” and therefore Sussmayr, only for later historical or analytical information to come to light which proves it had to be Mozart.
http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2009/04/05/who-wrote-the-mozar...
