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Notes -
What is the right way to consume poetry?
I would like to achieve a greater understanding of poetry and the canon of great poets; and I have many books of those in my house. But I'm not really clear on how people read poems, I guess. Like, with a novel, I sit down and read for as long as I feel like. Maybe a whole hour in a row or whatever. With poetry, the length is not on the same scale, and you're not typically following a plot or a narrative or anything. Poetry enjoyers, any insight you can provide would be appreciated.
I find poetry grossly overrated, it's been largely superseded through song.
I can count on the fingers of a single hand the poems I find compelling enough to strike a chord in me, often producing outright frission, such as Howl by Ginsberg, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, and for more left-field examples:
By a six year old child named Neil who has more talent in his undropped balls than Rupi Kaur has in her whole body.
Or less seriously:
By Zhang Xiachong, a bandit leader from 17th century China.
When Alex Turner puts I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clark to music with his dulcet tones, he blows dry words on paper out of the water.
Poetry is dead because it's largely obsolete, no two ways about it.
I think that while some certain simpler forms of poetry may be "superseded" by song, epic or longer form poetry provides the refutation here. Works like The Divine Comedy, De Rerum Natura, or Virgil's Georgics are pinnacles of the art form that would only be made lesser by the addition of music. And to take your example of I Wanna Be Yours, as soon as Alex Turner sings it in his dulcet tones, set to the idiosyncratic sound of the Arctic Monkeys, it has become something other than the original entirely. In fact, reading just the John Cooper Clark poem, it strikes me as distinctly corny in a way that the song version covers up.
Poetry's finest examples need no other assistance than the ink on the page. And they invite reflection that lasts longer than the allotted three minutes of a pop song.
And yet hardly anyone reads them, while popularity is hardly the primary standard most people use to ascertain the quality of a work of art, even classical symphonies from the late 17th or 18th centuries get much more appreciation for being truly timeless.
And that's precisely my point, the emotions conveyed by lyrics being sung, set to music, grossly outweigh the same relegated to paper.
Whether that's a cover up or not, I'll let everyone else do the judging.
The relevant comparison is not "All time greats in poetry" versus "the average pop song".
If going solely off popularity, then the clade of poetry in vogue these days is so awful that I'd rather quite literally read the blank space between the lines. There's almost certainly good new poetry out there, even great examples, but almost nobody cares about it, and what normally gets signal boosted is primarily for pure signaling purposes.
Book 2 of the Aeneid still goes hard, even in translation. The fall of the city does pull at the heartstrings.
The closest I have come to reading Homerian works is the War Nerd's Iliad, which is absolutely fantastic, and I think it both captures and contextualizes the story faithfully more than any direct translation could.
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I would like, as an aside, to commend how music and tone does add and potentially subvert the "raw" meaning of the words. Consider Eurydice's rendition of Farewell in the video game Hades versus Orpheus' rendition of it. (I'm on the phone, so find it on youtube yourself).
Not only am I on the phone too, but I'm on-call at the hospital, so it'll have to wait ;)
I should get around to playing Hades, the reviews really are raving, even if roguelikes aren't my thing.
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