Poetry

Poetry has become a major interest of mine recently. I would mostly read novels but the way in which I read novels would be to glean insight into philisophical or cultural or historical ideas. Moving down the path of the history of literature inevitably forces one to engage with poetry. So I have read the Iliad and the Odyssey, but those should only count so much because they are translated from AncientGreek and so their poetic power is lost on me. It might seem strange to start that far back, but scholars and hobbyists always seem to vouch for "starting with the Greeks" for literature in general, not just poetry. A happy compromise I have found to join together an English language study of poetry with a study of the formal roots of the artform is to read the Chapman translations of Homer. I learned of these translation when reading a poem of John Keats, "Reflections Upon Reading Chapman's Homer" or something like that. I think the word "reflections" is wrong here. Because of this introduction it seemed all the more appropriate to read these, as if destined by the fates to use a metaphor that fits the theme. Keats' poetry is extremely impressive from what I have read so far, but I always feel like I'm missing something as the vocabulary can be a bit verbose. I'm eager to see if my re-reads of Homer help me click into the lexicon somehow. I also need to keep going through the Canterbury Tales, which have in two modernizations as well as a brilliant complete Chaucer in the original MiddleEnglish. After these I would like to do some Spencer (The Faerie Queen) and Milton (Paradise Lost). With all these dense works with their dry, stuffy reputations as foundations I hope the rest of the English poetry canon is easier. I really am starting to love poetry. I hope I have more to say soon. Despite the difficulties I am glad I can always fall back on Emily Dickinson; she is my favorite poet so far.