To feel Poetry has died a death in modern society?

[Marmitemother]

Out of curiosity I searched MN expecting to find a topic page on poetry and literature....have I missed it somewhere?

Semi retired, children flown the nest, hubbie and I always busy with projects yet still find time to read poetry most days.

I'm wondering if others, particularly younger folk (we're in our 60's) didn't learn to appreciate poetry at school or just don't have time or the inclination to read, share and discuss compared to all else available these days (TV, phones, cinema, social media etc)

I read The Journey by Mary Oliver this morning and thought about how it spoke to many posting on the Relationship page.

“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”

I'm a 45 year old literature and philosophy student. Blake and Coleridge left me feeling meh.

I would recommend Anna Letita Baubald for some kick ass, feminist, subversive poetry of that time.

@OMG12

There is nothing obtuse about Blake and his poisoned tree.

Maybe it was how he felt.

And maybe the thistle was right.

I was talking to someone yesterday about the ease of being a polymath in the 18thC, particularly if male. As knowledge was much more scant, it wasn't even possible to be a specialist if educated (and let's be honest, it was only really men that were fully educated).

The need for true specialism has only become incumbent as we understand more about our very nature, and the nature of the universe in which we dwell.

Post Renaissance, post Enlightenment, knowledge was still seen holistically because there was much less knowledge.

(And indeed knowledge should still be seen holistically, because we are all part of a whole, but the whole is now understood to be much more complex than previously thought).

I don't buy Coldridge and Blake as 'The best that ever there was'.

They were OK. For their time.

When I was this 7 year old my mum took me to a big bookshop with a poetry section/kids poetry section and said I could buy a book of my choice from it. Having that choice and the time to flick through and find things you liked was brilliant. I bought a collection of funny poems.

If you want to buy online I think Michael Rosen has edited a lot of anthologies of kids poems.

Childrens' poetry anthologies are a great starting point, your child can find the poets and styles s/he loves most and follow them up online with your support. They tend to be a lot more diverse than poetry anthologies for adults (I had no idea how boring most poetry collections for adults were until I went through my dad's bookshelves).

Enjoying the variety of tastes on this thread, I also HATE Hardy and his stupid bleak bush.

I guess it’s a matter of taste, maybe I’m drawn particularly to Blake , especially his prophetic works, due to my interest in Hermetic Qabalah and the need for balance and interdependence of opposites and emanationism, I see this throughout his work. Whether or not he belonged to any formal Rosicrucian society he was certainly Rosicrucian in spirit. All these things I am drawn to, and, I think we are drawn to poetry where we see a reflection of ourselves. For me, Blake is equal to, if not better than, Shakespeare. I see the meaning of life in his works, a spiritual journey to enlightenment. Others might not see this or value it. Poetry, I think more so than any other art form Is subjective. It is the secondary imagination described by Coleridge.

it’s an interesting proposition regarding being a polymath in the 18th century as opposed to, say, now. I think, yes there was less knowledge, but at the same time, it was far more difficult to access this knowledge than now. I think there is a difference though between then and now in that I think a natural curiosity, talking to a wide variety of people of different views in the salons has been replaced by echo chambers of social media and the need to be “right”. There’s a lack of interest in true debate, most discussions end in ad hominem. Amongst many circles having a good debate is frowned upon either as being argumentative or intellectual posturing. There’s an information overload, meaning it can become impossible to know anything, if you exercise Curiositas rather that studiositas It’s becoming increasingly difficult to learn outside whichever silo you’re in. Society is more divisive, being able to talk across a wide variety of topics is becoming increasingly difficult for all these reasons, as well as many others.

Which poets do you like and why?

This did
make
me

chuckle.

I was talking to someone yesterday about the ease of being a polymath in the 18thC, particularly if male. As knowledge was much more scant, it wasn't even possible to be a specialist if educated (and let's be honest, it was only really men that were fully educated).

Honestly, this is such nonsense. Just because there are things that people thought were true in the eighteenth century, which we now believe to be wrong, doesn't mean 'knowledge was more scant'. Of course people were specialists - both then and for centuries before that. It's so incredibly arrogant to assume that only our own contemporaries can possibly have grappled with a wealth of knowledge and a need for specialism.

It's also so very sexist and snobby to say that only men were 'fully educated'. What do you mean by 'fully educated'?

The worst experience beyond the excruciating Poetry Slam group who fulfilled the requirements of every stereotype at a festival - throwing a strop at the Sound Engineer and Stage Manager because they couldn't march on during the last song of the band that was on before them (so they could put their packed lunches, anoraks and picnic chairs in front of the drum riser) - and starting with an absolute banger called 'Forest'

''Ahem. Forest. I walk through the forest and look at them all. Some trees are

(pregnant pause)

Big.

And some trees are

(He's not going to do it, is he? He's not really going to go there? He can't. Oh God, he is)

Small.''

• was having to listen to recordings of Dylan Thomas and TS Eliot during my A Levels.

It was bad enough spending hours to end up with poetry shattered into metaphorical pieces over my desk, but to have the authors destroy the images they could create with their words in toneless drones? Ugh.

For me, poetry is a performance. And for a performance, you need a talented performer. If somebody can hold a mob of six year olds completely lost in the description and call and response of Macavity or Measles, transport the listener to the hearth of a thousand year old fire listening to the blueprint/script for every monster movie, or have somebody come over all unnecessary because Middle English just sounds so darned sexy, they are the person who should be sharing the words.

(By the way, English Lit teachers, if you're doing The Wasteland, don't do it in the depths of a cold, wet, dark and miserable February. It's supposed to be in April and if you do it as soon as everybody's back from Christmas, you're going to be stuck with 30 depressed teenagers for the next few weeks until you cheer them up with Chaucer.)

Yes, I mean people like Dr John Dee had a vast wealth and range of knowledge, some of which we might no longer value but that doesn’t detract from him. I think there was a much stronger ability to think across a range of subject and see how they corresponded and complimented each other. In many respects I would suggest we have lost a lot of knowledge whilst simultaneously gaining lots of information. I certainly don’t think we are any cleverer now than say 500 years ago.

i was listening to Dr Brian Cox this morning on the BBC talking about what would happen if you went into a black hole. How someone observing you would effectively see you frozen in time just before you entered the black hole. You would however carry on and everything about you would be absorbed by the black hole and become part of its fabric. I seem to recall reading somewhere how we could have all have originated from something spewed out of a black hole. How very close to emanating from and returning to source in Neoplatonic thought. A timeless source. Our intellect hasn’t really grown, our ways of expressing it have changed. History is littered with people more intelligent that we could ever imagine. You live only got to look at the Egyptians to understand that.

I am constantly in awe of the first modern sound engineers. They weren't fiddling with valves and electrical current, though. They were constructing cathedrals, inventing new ways of supporting structures and creating spaces where human voices could create waveforms that, in reflection and replication, would increase in amplitude and change perceived direction in a way that the voices would move around the space and travel upwards - they specifically engineered the spaces so that they achieved their aim of carrying voices up to Heaven.

And why do Western orchestras tune to Middle A? It's now set at 440Hz, but before the adoption of Even Temperament, was around 428-435Hz. Guess what people would have heard that vibrates at that frequency range? A Bumblebee when buzz pollinating a flower. People created instruments that echoed the tones of a warm Summer's Day - they found ways of emulating and evoking peace and the creation of life through sound without the knowledge that this was what they were doing.

Genius has always been with us.

@HighlandCowbag shout out to Anna Letitia Barbauld! She's amazing. And would have been right at home with the visionary turn this thread has taken. She was on to Coleridge though: accurately diagnosed him: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51902/to-mr-st-coleridge

There will always be a hunger for poetry - I teach it in a men's prison, and the work I see moves me and inspires me to persevere with my own work.
Read poetry aloud, listen to its cadences and pauses, then look at the shape of it on the page. Especially the spaces around the text.

Kendrick Lamar’s ‘United in Grief’ and ‘Alright’ are fantastic examples of modern poetry.

Yes she was very astute. I am doing a romantic to Modernism module. I have found the women poets fascinating to study, especially the contextual side of them. Have just done a short essay on Rights Of Woman and found Barbaulds background fascinating. Also Heman using Byrons lines in her own work is fabulous.

These women were revolutionaries and in very vulnerable positions socially and financially. To publish the stuff they did, when they did is akin to publishing anti-trans poetry now, or speaking up in the workplace about sexual harassment or fronting the Me Too movement.

I'm definitely not clever enough or literary enough to do their work justice by analysing it but can definitely appreciate the risks they took.

Frank Skinner is a lover of poetry and has an excellent poetry podcast on Absolute Radio where he discusses a different poet each episode planetradio.co.uk/podcasts/frank-skinner-poetry-podcast/

I went to a poetry reading recently. It was brilliant. It was sold out. Mainly women, about 3 men in the audience. And the "support act" was amazing - I'd never have discovered him if I hadn't been to that evening. I'll be reading more poetry as a result, I think.

Indeed, and close to Aristotelean elemental thought, particularly as it relates to the interplay between spirit and body. Philosophy, theology and science are not at all far removed from one another, albeit in more recent thought they've separated into distinct disciplines. The pseudo-science of psychoanalysis, for one, was strongly rooted in ancient symbolism, particularly in the work of Jung.

The more I read into them, the more I'm concluding that the wisdom of the ancients is unparalleled, or at the very least, has never been usurped by modern knowledge. As you say, modern knowledge is merely compartmentalized differently.

I'm liking the sound of that Romantic to Modernism module! So much of Modernism is so deeply rooted in romantic thought, despite Eliot's protestation that the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it. I'd have given a great deal to study (or develop) a course like that.

I'm loving the contributions to this thread which are giving me plenty of food for thought (and an ever-more expensive reading list on my Amazon wishlist)!

NB. H.D. and Mina Loy were certainly two of the risk-taking women poets you speak of, @HighlandCowbag. In Loy, 'Song to Joannes' and the feminist manifesto are both extraordinary pieces of writing, especially for her time. She was a trailblazer, and a talented visual artist as well as a poet.

I think, given the right tools, anyone can analyse poetry and that this should never be the exclusive domain of professional literary critics. On the contrary, I've read plenty of academic criticism that I think talks complete balderdash. All that's really required is passion: something that gets your blood up and that talks to you in some meaningful way.

It would be a sad thing if the only place 'legitimized' for reading, writing and talking about poetry was the universities, especially given the state they are in today ...

In recent years I have been reading a lot more poetry. It started as a New Year’s Resolution - I decided that, instead of giving things up, I would add things to enrich my life. The first year, my resolution was to read a new poem and listen to a new (new to me, any genre) piece of music and read a new poem every week, but I enjoyed it so much, I ended up doing it almost daily. After that year, my resolution was reading a poem every day - this year I have a book with a poem to read every night, and I’ve bought an anthology of poetry for next year.

I don’t love every poem, but I have read and enjoyed a lot of poetry I wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.

I really appreciate the work of Jung. He drew together a lot of escoteric thought from over the centuries and made a valiant attempt to make it accessible to the masses as an explanation as to how we are as we are. I know he was fascinated by the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkrutz, reading that alone and deciphering the symbolism in it could take decades IMO. I suppose the problem with some of his work is that it drew on many escoteric ideas which were never meant to be exoteric so I think his appeal now largely relies on the knowledge and predisposition of the reader. I suspect the intellectual elite in the first half of the 20 th century might have been more open to his ideas. There is genius in them. But it’s perhaps a modern example of the point being made. To judge genius anachronistically is to do much disservice.

i know what you mean about the books, if only I had time to read them all😀

Simon Armitage: The Not Dead is my favourite book of poetry at present; it gives a voice to British veterans stemming from WW2 through to The Iraq War. I also loved The Bed: a tribute to the unnamed ww1 soldier buried in Westminster Abbey. Some of the 18th century romantics made some banging poetry, too.

Came on to say the same.

@pastypirate @MadameCholetsDirtySecret You'll always get a guy with a pie!

I don't agree that poetry is in decline at all - quite the opposite - if you think that - it suggests to me that you're not really engaging with what's been going on in so many areas - as others have said poetry is not one thing - it's a very broad church and means different things to different people. If you've ever been to a poetry writing group it never ceases to amaze me how little we all have in common with one another in what switches us on - in terms of who or what we read and why we write. I often say that the world of poetry is like a long stretch of coast - a beach covered in shells - there are so many shells to pick up, examine and either keep or put down again - I think an interest in poetry is a never ending search for that handful of shells that you want to hold on to - my tastes have changed as I have discovered new writers. Publishers like Bloodaxe have brought a lot of translated poetry into the conversation (e.g. Adelia Prado) the more you keep looking the more you find. There are loads of poetry blogs where people share poems and their thoughts on them - Anthony Wilson's is excellent (anthonywilsonpoetry.com/ he lists other blogs and poets to check out anthonywilsonpoetry.com/awesomepoets/) - his brilliant collection of generally not very well known poems - Lifesaving Poems - is an excellent collection to get you enthused about new writers as are the Bloodaxe collections Staying Alive, etc. Ultimately I prefer to track down the featured authors original collections - e.g. Malena Morling (and that can sometimes be quite hard but there's a joy in that too imho) - names that probably don't spring easily to most peoples minds - because - there are so many poems, so many poets to discover - this is why - as Brain Eno has said - curators are so important in art these days.

Personally I don't read much before about 1950 - most of what I gravitate towards has been written in the last 40 years, often new work - Ted Kooser is one I follow, Simon Armitage (who might be losing his touch tbh) - but he's working hard to promote the art. He's repeated said in many different ways that "It’s never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it’s kind of unkillable, poetry. It’s our most ancient artform and I think it’s more relevant today than ever, because it’s one person saying what they really believe.”

It's not dying - it's a renaissance if anything imho.

@larkstar thank you- I'm a bloodaxe fan. It's definitely a great jumping off point. Although I did t know about lifesaving poems. I'm just looking at the Anthony Wilson site. It's brilliant. I love the idea that he curated a collection of poems on the criterion that each had to be one he couldn't do without!! My kind of criterion. Thank you. I'll pass to ds (who will already know about it)

Also here's a beautiful anthology with short relatable commentary. Stick it on your Christmas list! It's beautiful

https://www.waterstones.com/book/poetry-unbound/padraig-o-tuama//9781838856328?awaid=3787&utmsource=redbrain&utmmmedium=shopping&utmcampaign=css&gbraid=0AAAAADA7QQIEhZfjs8vD1pOQSyDIH4VU&gclid=CjwKCAiAmuKbBhA2EiwAxQnt7-TfTfekGmDzrRap9oyMrKp7t6ey9tzd9LhsbjZXUv-mQQefGW4cOxoCZPsQAvDBwE