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I created this poetry folder for all of you who love poetry, like poetry, or just feel the need to test out the waters with some poetry. Anyone is welcome to share a poem. I encourage each poem to be a separate thread to allow for discussion. You can either type out the poem completely or provide a link to the poem for people to read it. Poems should be from a classic author, I'd say pre-1950s or so. No contemporary poetry please. Hopefully we can have fun with this and have some great discussions analyzing poetry.

Okay, I just have to say that I am loving this poetry thread! I'm going to start my day here. :)
K

I'm glad you love it! It is a great place to both read and discuss favorite poems as well as discover poetry you've never read before.

Why no contemporary poetry? Some of today's poet's are amazing and are already considered classics in the Literary field. For example Robert Hass or Mary Oliver (who I personally hate). Also consider Ginsberg, O'Hara, Sexton, and Plath. These writers are definitely considered classics, but are post 1950.

Ines wrote: "Why no contemporary poetry? Some of today's poet's are amazing and are already considered classics in the Literary field. For example Robert Hass or Mary Oliver (who I personally hate). Also consid..."

There are other groups on ŷ������ that read all kinds of poetry and contemporary classics. This group is a classic book group that has a section for poetry. Our one rule as stated above and in other places in this group is that all classics we read be pre 1950's. I hope this helps you understand.

Looking forward to reading people's beloved classic poets!

What does the group think of https.//- William_Butler_Yeats
When "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." tells us when the end is near.

Please, please, don’t tell me that this “Discussion Board�� is closed?
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find someone to enjoy classic poetry? I discovered it a few years ago a few years ago, and it was a brave new world!
I like so many poets like Yeats, Auden, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but I love Emily Dickinson. Her poems are so amazing!
I’ll leave you with my favorite one, it may not be her best, but it was the poem that made me star reading her poetry, I know it by heart.
“Hope�� is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Elsa wrote: "Please, please, don’t tell me that this “Discussion Board�� is closed?
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find someone to enjoy classic poetry? I discovered it a few years ago a few years a..."

Boards on ŷ������ are almost never closed. (They can be closed by moderators if necessary, but that's unusual; they usually remain open indefinitely.)

If you want to discuss a poem, go to the Poetry Folder, click on New Topic (just above "last activity,"), put the title of the poem as the subject line, and if possible copy the poem in (lengthy poems like Tintern Abbey can't really be copied in, but in that case if possible include a link to it online).

Keep in mind that this is a Classics group, and the rules are nothing after the 1950s at the latest.

Everyman wrote: "Elsa wrote: "Please, please, don’t tell me that this “Discussion Board�� is closed?
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find someone to enjoy classic poetry? I discovered it a few years ago ..."

:)Thanks for your reply. I’m really happy to discover this group of discussion. I always found it interesting how nationality influences our literary knowledge and taste. I never read a single word from Stephen Crave, nor Philip Larkin, in fact, I never heard anything about them, but it will be a pleasure to discover them and many others that I never heard about.

I never read Tintern Abbey, the romantics are not my favorite, but I’m willing to review my opinion, with the right encouragement, and examples! :)

Hi, Elsa--love your enthusiasm for poetry, and just wanted to point out that "Hope is the thing with feathers" already has a thread in this forum :-)

/topic/show/...

So many wonderful poems have already been posted, and we can chip it our "two cents" at any point. Thanks so much for the poetry thread, Jenn!

Dear Julia,

I love poetry, I’m not ashamed to say that sometimes I have no idea what the poem is talking about, and other times I’m not sure if my interpretation has anything to do with the poet’s ideas and feelings, but ,to me, poetry is like a mirror that changes depending on the person who looks at it.

Fernando Pessoa, a great Portuguese poet, wrote a poem that says that each poem has three different “feelings��: The first is the one the poet feels, the second the one that he puts in words, the third is the one the reader feels when he read the poem.

I believe in freedom of interpretation, that’s why I only “discover�� poetry after I finished school, I hated that each poem had only one correct interpretation, and I also hated the way school has always taught the same texts of an author just because twenty years ago someone decided that those were the best, the most important.

Sometimes I don’t like nor understand, the complete poem, but there are some verses that are so beautiful and meaningful, that I can't take them out of my mind.

I’ll enjoy become acquainted (this word is so Jane Austen!) with new poets and poems, and with the persons who read them.

I totally agree, Elsa--I was a teacher for 31 years, and NEVER "told" students what a poem meant. We'd study the poet her/himself to find what THEY wanted to convey, but the students could always express their own feelings.

That's the secret of poetry for me--to express feelings. I'm sorry your school experience used that old approach--hopefully things have changed :-)

Back in the dark ages (40 years ago) when I was in College, most places closed for three hours Good Friday afternoon. The University, however, held classes as usual. I had an English Lit class at 1:30 that afternoon. The Professor told us attendance would be optional. I had a later class so I came. He read and lectured on the symbolism of a poem by John Donne on Good Friday. It was the amazing Lit class I ever attended.

Julia wrote: "I totally agree, Elsa--I was a teacher for 31 years, and NEVER "told" students what a poem meant. We'd study the poet her/himself to find what THEY wanted to convey, but the students could always e..."

:)Maybe in our next reincarnation you can be my teacher.

Julia wrote: "I totally agree, Elsa--I was a teacher for 31 years, and NEVER "told" students what a poem meant. "


Well, yes, but.

Sometimes you need to tell students more about the poem than they can glean from it for themselves. I think, for example, of much of Donne's work, where the references need explaining to a modern teenager.

Take, for example, lines from The Canonization. Most of my students loved the idea that the world should go away and leave them alone, which of course they got. But they had trouble with many of the lines. For example:

Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;
Or the king's real, or his stamp'd face

To them, take a course means take a class in school, which of course is not what Donne meant at all. They don't understand that "his stamp'd face" mean his face stamped in a coin.

Or, for the many who have never seen a moth or fly fly into a candle, the lines

Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die

mean nothing to them, whereas Donne's audience would be intimately familiar with the image.

They need help in understanding this language so that they can best appreciate the poem, which is a wonderful poem for a teenager.

So yes, we shouldn't try to tell them what a poem SHOULD mean to them, but we can help them get a better understanding of the poem so they have a better ability to reach the AH-HA of what it DOES mean to them.

EXACTLY, Everyman. Helping them grasp allusions and work through the meaning of certain phrases is what a teacher is FOR, imho. And I included certain commentaries that would help them grasp those layers of meaning, so that it wasn't just me "telling" them.

What I tried to devise was a system of close reading that helped them be more honest readers, rather than just skimming to get the "basic idea". The formula looked like this: HLV?!*

The "HL" was for highlighting, the "V" for vocabulary, the "?" for any allusion they did not understand (and they then looked up), the "!" for allusions they DID understand, and the "*" for what they loved. I always started discussions with their "stars".

In fact, even though I'm retired, I still use it myself :-) I just posted a "V" from Peter Pan about a "coracle". I could have skipped over it, since the word denoted some kind of boat--but learning those details deepens any reading for me.

Once they learned the system, it was pretty amazing to see them work on a piece of literature, both together and alone. Ozymandias was the sonnet that gained the most depth for them, as they discovered Ramses II rather than my just "telling" them about that allusion.