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Poetry's always nice for familiarity and rereadability. Perhaps Shakespeare's Sonnets.
by dri_ft 8y ago
Poetry's always nice for familiarity and rereadability. Perhaps Shakespeare's Sonnets.
- criddell 8y agoWhat was your entry into poetry? Because Shakespeare was always presented as something you should read because it's good for you, not because you enjoy it when I was in high school, I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy it.
- arethuza 8y agoShakespeare and Robert Burns were both blighted for me by being inflicted at high school. Ironically I found that I really like A Midsummer Night's Dream by watching a movie version with my son who was performing in it at school.
- dri_ft 8y agoI got into it relatively recently, way after high school. I think I got my start mostly with Victorians like Christina Rosetti, maybe some of the Romantics. Far away enough in time to be interestingly different, but close enough that the language is comprehensible. And prior to all that modernist experimentation which moved poetry away from poetry as I understand it. (I don't denigrate that stuff but it isn't a good entry point.) Shakespeare's sonnets are a bit more accessible than his plays insofar as each one is a small, manageable, bite-sized chunk. Nonetheless, they do require fairly slow, relaxed attention in an edition with good notes to get the most out of them. (When I was reading them, I would read a couple very slowly over breakfast every day. I miss being able to do that!)
- veddox 8y agoI always enjoyed writing poetry myself, but I only discovered I liked reading it when I read some of the Romantics. Their themes and style resonated with me, so I read more of them and started to get a taste for it. The more I learnt to appreciate poetry, the more I found that Romantics weren't the only good poets, so I expanded to the Realists, the Metaphysical poets, the fin-de-siecle, etc. And, yes, Shakespeare too ;-) (He takes practice to read and you can't read a lot of him in one sitting, but he really deserves his reputation as an amazing author and poet.)
- nmg 8y agoMay I suggest Robert Frost? He's fanatical about rigorously adhering to meter, cunningly so.. when you go back and count the iambs it's striking how few deviate. The way he encodes his lyricism is subtle and soothing, like a precise, subaudible metronome. If this appeals to you, then dip into Shakespeare's sonnets, and let yourself feel the rhythm as you read. It's so bloody good.
- cschmidt 8y agoI really enjoy Ted Kooser. A poet from Nebraska, who was the poet laureate twice. His recent Splitting an Order was wonderful.
- veddox 8y agoYes, and it's great to combat mood swings :D I have a fairly extensive and varied poetical library that I regularly go back to for all kinds of reasons. TS Eliot is probably my favourite, you can read him every week for a year without fully understanding him, but every time you understand him just a little bit better and every time you glory anew in his superb control of imagery and language.