Poetry

Introduction

po·et·ry

ˈpōətrē/

noun

1. literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

The idea that poetry is a thing that can be defined by an immediate handful of words is an improbable one. Many have tried, and yet still in the twenty first century nobody has agreed summarily on a single, choice definition.

But we can all agree that we know a poem when we see one, surely. And you would like to read these. But you don't know where to begin, or even how to begin. That's what this wiki is for.

Meter, Form, Structure, and What it Means to You

A person interested in reading (and writing, eventually) poetry should learn the technical side of it. The reason for this is because it allows you a deeper understanding and appreciation of a poem and for the talent of a poet; consider that every good poem written in verse has a metrical scheme for a reason, consider that the form used serves a purpose: each nuance to the meter, each inverted foot is purposeful. It's the nuance, and the hand for it that a good poet has in manipulating his medium that makes it worthwhile to understand and appreciate. They add affects, emphasize or symbolize and so on. These are things you won't and can't notice nor appreciate if you're not even aware they're happening.

Furthermore, should you eventually decide you'd like to try writing a poem, you'll find yourself to have more tools at your disposal and a wider range of abilities and effects should you familiarize yourself with form.

Recommendations

Name	Author
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form	Paul Fussell
Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry	David Mason & John Frederick Nims
A Poetry Handbook	Mary Oliver
Rhyme's Reason	John Hollander
The Ode Less Traveled	Stephen Fry

History

Next, the Greeks. So many poets reference and allude to greco-roman mythology that you'll miss out on a lot if you're not familiar with it.

Recommendations

• Homer
• Hesiod
• Horace
• Virgil
• Ovid

Assuming for some reason you choose not to read the firsthand material, there are guides to classical mythology that one can read to become summarily acquainted with it.

Recommendations

Name	Author
Mythology	Edith Hamilton
The Greek Myths	Robert Graves
Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece	Gustav Schwab

Now, consider that mythology plays a large role in many poetic traditions, and it exists outside the Greco-Roman branch. Yeats for example draws largely on Irish tales in his early poetry, but Greek and Roman myths are at the forefront of influence in English poetry. Biblical allusions are also extremely prevalent in English verse, so it couldn't hurt to be familiar with the Old and New testaments either. Of course, one can read poetry without reading myths and look up references as you go, but you might not pick up on some of the more subtle ones.

Anthologies

A good place to begin reading poetry after one has become familiar with form and history is with an anthology. An anthology offers a comprehensive overview of English poems from the beginning to contemporary that you can skim through to get a feel for your taste. Norton's Anthology of Poetry spans from Chaucer up through the last few decades, but it mostly drops you in with little background, so if you're not confident in your ability to understand context it might not be your favorite option. Alternatively Harold Bloom offers his collection of "The Best Poems of the English Language", which includes quite a few poets from Chaucer through Frost, and he prefaces each poet with biographical background and usually commentary on his or her poetry. There are also collections of poetry that focus on specific periods and movements, so if you have an idea of what era of poetry in particular you like you might start with one of those.

Recommendations

Name	Author/Editor
The Best Poems of the English Language	Harold Bloom
The Norton Anthology of Poetry	Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter & Jon Stallworthy
A Folio Anthology of Poetry	Carol Ann Duffy
The Winged Horse Anthology	Joseph Auslander & Frank Ernest Hill
The Oxford Book of English Verse	Arthur Quiller-Couch
The New Oxford Book of English Verse	Helen Gardner

Poets

After you've looked through an anthology and understand better your own preferences, you can pick through the poets you enjoyed and study them further individually, then branch back out by reading poets similar to them, reading about their period and others in the period, read those they influenced or were influenced by, and so on.

I feel that adding a list of recommended poets to read here is unnecessary, should one follow the recommended reading of the previous entries. After even skimming through an anthology one should have a plethora of poets that they're interested in and should, on their own, be able to read from there.

Nonetheless, a VERY cursory list of poets:

Recommendations

• Homer
• Anacreon
• Hesiod
• Ovid
• Horace
• Virgil
• Dante
• Ibn al-Farid
• Beowulf
• Petrarch
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• William Dunbar
• Thomas Wyatt
• Sir Walter Ralegh
• Edmund Spenser
• Sir Philip Sydney
• Lope de Vega
• Michael Drayton
• Christopher Marlowe
• William Shakespeare
• Thomas Campion
• Thomas Nashe
• John Donne
• Ben Jonson
• Robert Herrick
• George Herbert
• Thomas Carew
• John Milton
• Anne Bradstreet
• Richard Lovelace
• Andrew Marvell
• Henry Vaughan
• John Dryden
• Aphra Behn
• Jonathan Swift
• Alexander Pope
• Samuel Johnson
• Friedrich Gottlieb
• Johann Von Goethe
• William Blake
• Robert Burns
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Walter Savage Landor
• George Gordon Lord Byron
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• John Clare
• John Keats
• Heinrich Heine
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Edward Fitzgerald
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Robert Browning
• Herman Melville
• Walt Whitman
• Dante Gabrielle Rossetti
• Victor Hugo
• Théophile Gautier
• Charles Baudelaire
• Emily Dickinson
• Christina Rossetti
• Lewis Carroll
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Thomas Hardy
• Paul Verlaine
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Arthur Rimbaud
• A.E Housman
• Rudyard Kipling
• Paul Valéry
• Gottfried Ben
• Max Ernst
• W.B Yeats
• Robert Frost
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Wallace Stevens
• William Carlos Williams
• D.H Lawrence
• Ezra Pound
• T.S Eliot
• Wilfred Owen
• e.e cummings
• Hart Crane
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Pablo Neruda
• W.H Auden
• Philip Larkin
• James Merrill
• John Ashbery
• W.S Merwin
• Ted Hughes

Supplemental Reading

There's an unlimited amount of secondary texts that'll contribute to your reading of poetry. Essays, letters, handbooks, etc. Commentaries on poetry itself, poetics, conversations between poets, all sorts of things. Odds are if you have a favorite poet they've had something to say about the medium. A few Google searches will surely provide you with something to read if you're interested.

Recommendations

• A Poet's Glossary - Edward Hirsch

A glossary of poetic terms and phrases concerning poetry and its tradition. Very useful for looking up things you may forget or reading through and learning things you might not have known. Somewhat friendly in tone so it's approachable as something more than just mechanical definitions.

• Princeton's Encyclopedia of Poetry

Like Hirsch's glossary of poetic terms, but more comprehensive and more academic in tone.

• Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke talks about what it means (to him) to be a poet and his process of poetry and the nature of it.

• In Defense of Poetry - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley discusses what he thinks poetry is and what poetry does and means.

• The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom

Bloom's take on influence and how a writer interacts with his predecessors.

• ABC of Reading - Ezra Pound

A manual for reading and on literature. Pound discusses the importance of literature and what it does, how it's done, why it's done, and how he thinks it should be done.

• The Routlege Anthology of Poets on Poets - David Hopkins

A collection of poems, letters, etc by poets regarding the medium of verse, what it means etc, and of poets discussing other poets. Very interesting, and gives you a feel for how the tradition developed and morphed throughout the ages.

• Bloom's Critical Studies/Bloom's Major Poets

Essays and studies on various movements and poets, edited and introduced by Harold Bloom.

On Translation in Poetry

A translation is an x-ray. That is, it allows one to see the "bones" of a poem, but beyond that much is lost. When you read Ezra Pound's translation of Confucius, you are reading a poem by Ezra Pound in which he attempted to imitate Confucius; this is because language is not 1-to-1, and the disparity changes from language to language. For example, translating a poem from Chinese into English is extremely difficult, as the Chinese written language operates on entirely different grammar concepts than English, as Chinese characters are closer to being symbols that represent an idea or group of ideas rather than individual characters that conjoin to form a word with an agreed-upon definition. A translation at best is an interpretation or imitation of the original.

So, to judge Confucius' ability as a poet based on Ezra Pound's interpretation of him is ignorant, as one is not reading Confucius.

This is not to say that translations are entirely a waste of time in poetry. Many translations prove to be amazing pieces of verse on their own, Alexander Pope's translations of Homer for example, or Joseph Cadora's translations of Rilke's 'New Poems'. Just keep in mind that you are not reading Homer or Rilke.

Author's Note for Writers

For those of you interested in writing poetry, as a teacher of poetry classes I ask that you do two simple things:

1. Know form.
2. Read more poetry than you write.

Otherwise, I can guarantee that you will never write a single piece of redeemable poetry in your entire life, regardless of whether you write free verse or not. Reading is the single most important part of writing. Try to set a standard of some sort; for every one poem you write, read ten. I promise you that over time, the quality of your work will increase parallel to the amount of poetry you read (and more importantly, understand, as simply reading a poem does nothing for you if you fail to understand what's going on and what makes it good or bad).