Bored Now.
Nov. 9th, 2010 06:46 pmFlist, I am at loose ends. Help me choose what to do with my evening by voting in this poll!
[Poll #1642712]
[Poll #1642712]
Nov. 9th, 2010
Bored Now.
Nov. 9th, 2010 06:46 pmFlist, I am at loose ends. Help me choose what to do with my evening by voting in this poll!
Over in my LJ, since I don't have polling privileges here.
Over in my LJ, since I don't have polling privileges here.
Perfect poems
Nov. 9th, 2010 10:40 pmAll right, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gamesiplay wrote this epic post about "perfect" poems, and now I have to navel-gaze about that for a while. A perfect poem is different from a "favorite" or "best" poem, though for me there's significant overlap. The working definition that she came up with is that "it has to do with some kind of intersection between an idea that affects me viscerally and a structure/progression/formulation that mirrors the way my mind works." I'm defining it as a poem (or section of a poem, if it's long) that you get and understand down in your soul. Of all the possible ways to put whatever it is that the poet has written into words, this is the one that makes the most sense to you, and you can't imagine it working as well in any other formulation.
(I'm stealing the Alan Bennett quotationgamesiplay used as well: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.")
To be honest, any number of Millay poems could be included here, because I think of all the poets I've read, her verse works most similarly to the way my mind works--very odd since she so often wrote in sonnets and other forms and I hate writing like that, but I guess it speaks to a certain organization of thought that functions similarly to my own. In the interest of brevity, I will limit myself to four: "Recuerdo," "Journey," "Renascence," and "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why."
Others: "The Wild Swans at Coole" and perhaps "The Circus Animals' Desertion" (Yeats), "The More Loving One" (Auden), "Patchwork" (Boland), "Diving into the Wreck" (Rich), Sonnet 73/"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Shakespeare), "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (Heaney), "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (Wright), "Horses and Men in the Rain" (Sandburg), the untitled poem that begins In Search of England (Morton), the last twenty-one lines of "Little Gidding" and possibly also part I of "Burnt Norton" (Eliot), maybe "Nostalgia" (Collins), maybe "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Gray), and perhaps "Church Going" (Larkin).
Yes, fully 75% of them were written between 1910 and 1963, WHAT OF IT. Modernism and its close successors ~speak to me~. And yeah, a few are cliches; I'm gonna say it just speaks to how perfect they are, how not a word is out of place, and so they're recognized as such by many people.
( Further analysis )
What are yours?
gamesiplay wrote this epic post about "perfect" poems, and now I have to navel-gaze about that for a while. A perfect poem is different from a "favorite" or "best" poem, though for me there's significant overlap. The working definition that she came up with is that "it has to do with some kind of intersection between an idea that affects me viscerally and a structure/progression/formulation that mirrors the way my mind works." I'm defining it as a poem (or section of a poem, if it's long) that you get and understand down in your soul. Of all the possible ways to put whatever it is that the poet has written into words, this is the one that makes the most sense to you, and you can't imagine it working as well in any other formulation.(I'm stealing the Alan Bennett quotation
gamesiplay used as well: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.")To be honest, any number of Millay poems could be included here, because I think of all the poets I've read, her verse works most similarly to the way my mind works--very odd since she so often wrote in sonnets and other forms and I hate writing like that, but I guess it speaks to a certain organization of thought that functions similarly to my own. In the interest of brevity, I will limit myself to four: "Recuerdo," "Journey," "Renascence," and "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why."
Others: "The Wild Swans at Coole" and perhaps "The Circus Animals' Desertion" (Yeats), "The More Loving One" (Auden), "Patchwork" (Boland), "Diving into the Wreck" (Rich), Sonnet 73/"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Shakespeare), "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (Heaney), "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (Wright), "Horses and Men in the Rain" (Sandburg), the untitled poem that begins In Search of England (Morton), the last twenty-one lines of "Little Gidding" and possibly also part I of "Burnt Norton" (Eliot), maybe "Nostalgia" (Collins), maybe "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Gray), and perhaps "Church Going" (Larkin).
Yes, fully 75% of them were written between 1910 and 1963, WHAT OF IT. Modernism and its close successors ~speak to me~. And yeah, a few are cliches; I'm gonna say it just speaks to how perfect they are, how not a word is out of place, and so they're recognized as such by many people.
( Further analysis )
What are yours?
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