Best epic poems?
Also, what's the best edition of Paradise Lost?
>>8616867
https://vimeo.com/20204690
>>8616875 This and Aurora Leigh
are there any good non fiction books which are literally about being depressed?
http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.html
>>8616862
Something should be in the chart of depressing literature. Check out the wiki if you have not done yet.
>>8616862
i hate this shitty narcissistic pseudo depression shit thats going on lately. STOP and go back to tumblr
>Are Fernando Pessoa the ultimate boss of the poets?
I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
Windows of my room,
The room of one of the world's millions nobody knows
(And if they knew me, what would they know?),
You open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people,
A street inaccessible to any and every thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain,
With the mystery of things beneath the stones and beings,
With death making the walls damp and the hair of men white,
With Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.
Today I'm defeated, as if I'd learned the truth.
Today I'm lucid, as if I were about to die
And had no greater kinship with things
Than to say farewell, this building and this side of the street becoming
A row of train cars, with the whistle for departure
Blowing in my head
And my nerves jolting and bones creaking as we pull out.
Today I'm bewildered, like a man who wondered and discovered and forgot.
Today I'm torn between the loyalty I owe
To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street
And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything's a dream.
I failed in everything.
Since I had no ambition, perhaps I failed in nothing.
I left the education I was given,
Climbing down from the window at the back of the house.
I went to the country with big plans.
But all I found was grass and trees,
And when there were people they were just like the others.
I step back from the window and sit in a chair. What should I think about?
Full poem:
http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.html
why was petrarch so based?
Come this way — some say with sweet eyes,
Opening their arms, and sure
That it could be good that I would listen to them
When they say: “Come this way”!
I look at them with unattached eyes,
(In my eyes there is irony and tiredness)
And I cross my arms,
And I never go that way…
This is my glory:
To create inhumanity!
Never to accompany anybody.
—For I live with the same unwillingness
I teared my mother’s womb with.
No, I won’t go that way! I only go through where
My own steps take me…
If what I search to know none of you can answer,
Why do you repeat: “Come this way”?
I prefer to slide on muddy corners,
To whirl at the wind,
Like rags, to drag my bleeding feet,
Than to go that way…
If I came to the world, was
Only to deflower virgin rain-forests,
And to draw my own feet on the unexplored sand!
All the rest I do is worth nothing.
How come you are the ones
Who will give me axes, tools and courage,
For I to throw down my obstacles?…
It runs, in your veins, the old blood of the grand-parents,
And you love what is easy!
I love the Far and the Mirage,
I love the abysses, the torrents, the deserts…
Go! you have roads,
You have gardens, you have flower-beds,
You have homelands, you have roofs,
And you have rules, and treatises, and philosophers, and wisemen.
I have my Madness!
I hold it high, like a torch, burning in the dark night,
And I feel foam, and blood, and chants on the lips…
God and the Devil are the ones who guide me, nobody else.
All of you had a father, all of you had a mother;
But I, who never start or end,
I was born from the love between God and the Devil.
Hah! That nobody gives me pious intentions!
That nobody asks me for definitions!
That nobody tells me: “Come this way”!
My life is a storm-wind that got unlocked.
It is a wave that has risen.
It is an extra atom that got animated…
I don’t know where I’m going through,
I don’t know where I’m going,
—I know I’m not going that way.
>>8616854
yes and any who claim otherwise are objectively wrong. Dude had like a billion different pseudonyms he published under, and all of them have distinct styles and personalities, and all of them are amazing.
Can I get recommendations on books like pic related? Something like a tragic romance cause reading romance is gay.
>>8616842
Have you tried reading Bob Dylan?
I read Two-Headed Boy on our school trip to mountaintops and it was fun
Fuck me, this is getting boring.
How can you assuredly distinguish between pretentious writing and "good" writing? The line generally seems to be very blurred
>>8616829
Why do you keep making this dumb thread? Look in the archive
>>8616829
>How to tell if some writing is pretentious
You just ask if anybody likes it on /lit/
Form and content. Is it poetically pleasing or effective? Does it strike you as true or novel? Good writing has a ring, just listen for it.
>2017
>#NobelsSoWhite
>2018
>pic related wins
Mark my words.
I don't think Beyonce actually writes any songs though.
>>8616822
>month leading up to Nobel prize
>'who cares anyway, it'll be a nonwhite minority literal who female'
>Dylan wins
>same autists still need to go mental
>>8616834
Because Dylan winning is far worse
Ayo /mu/ here and it was proven that we was a liderary intellectual now. How many Bob Dylan songs have you read /lit/? You bitches think your all that cause you read Hemmingsways and Dostoy-whatever and shit? Lol looks like the experts disagree and basically ur shits all retarded.
Ask a real liderary expert anything an get educated for once.
quality post
>reading Dylan
You're as bad as the people who say they've read Homer but don't know ancient Greek. Listen to the authentic nasal vocal performances not some bookish translation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOvs3rCFI2A
>>8616783
Honestly, you really DO belong on /mu/. This is the worst projecting satire I've ever read.
Hei guise...
I'm just wondering...
What would Hemingway's writing be like if he were a girl?
For sale: baby shoes, new
>>8616755
good
>>8616755
It'd have even more annoying forced symbolism
What do you guys think of W.G. Sebald?
I loved The Rings of Saturn. But that's all that I read
Reading Rings of Saturn in my European postmodern lit class. Excited about it.
>>8616605
Sounds neat, what other stuff are you guys reading?
Just finished God emperor of dune. Is this series worth going further with? It's getting fairly fucked up at this point
Why don't you read a little more to find out?
>>8616452
well the main point is made, the next books are okay as a new, smaller topic, but Emperor is the clear high point of the series.
>>8616456
Because I just read the first 4 books in a row and the series is taking some weird turns and don't know if it's worth continuing. I'll read something else nigga
lol you knew it was coming
Me on the upper left
Hitler looks like the kind of kid who would kick you in the mouth whilst you're tying your shoe laces.
Fake. That's not Wittgenstein but a boy called Ernst Dübel.
IIT: Post your shopping cart and others tell you whether to buy or not
pic related
>>8616311
Nausea is crap. I get the point of it and how and why its so mundane but it doesnt make it any better IMO. Wouldnt leave my shelf again.
>>8616354
Really? I had high hopes for it and was looking forward to reading it. Is it really bad?
>>8616354
seconded
Post the book you're currently reading and waifu.
Kobo Abe - The Box Man
Lolita - Lolita
Alfred Döblin - Berlin Alexanderplatz
notes from underground - the fat maid
“The deepest characteristic of [Percy Bysshe] Shelley's poetic mind is its skepticism. Shelley's intellectual agnosticism was more fundamental than either his troubled materialism or his desperate idealism. Had the poet turned his doubt against all but his poetry, he would have anticipated certain later developments in the history of literature, but his own work would have lost one of its most precious qualities, a unique sensitivity to its own limitations.”
Unpastured Sea - Harold Bloom
What are the "certain later developments" to which Bloom refers?
For context, Bloom argues against a popular scholarly conception of Shelley as a naturalist turned Platonist (idealist), and posits instead he is a skeptic, that his "eclecticism centers on the point where his empiricism terminates and his idealism begins", a conflict between "his self and his poetry" (consider the dissonances of the Enlightenment and Romanticism) until he "gave himself over to the dark side of his vision" and used this irreconcilable head-heart relationship to achieve a mode in which the mind must renovate itself "beyond the cyclic limitations of nature".
It's a chiefly aesthetic mode--"a vision [...] without the sanction of religious or mythological tradition"--but clearly in dialogue with both religion and philosophy, a reparation of both and 'new philosophy' into his poetic mind, which I think leads to Bloom's comment. ("IF he had turned his doubt against all but his poetry...") But I'm struggling to think of later such doubtful literature.
My mind goes to the modernists: ahistorical Beckett, atheist Woolf ("the whole world is a work of art"!), Joyce the textual/sensual atomist, in many ways a movement of faith crisis absorbed into form. But I don't know, seems like he's making a strongly implied reference but if so it's over my head. Or maybe it's just Bloom being Bloom about a degeneration of aesthetics?
(Also, please correct me if I've completely misunderstood the essay.)
>Or maybe it's just Bloom being Bloom about a degeneration of aesthetics
By this I mean, for example, pomo self-indulgence.
What do you mean by "textual/sensual atomist", OP?
>>8615916
Forgive me, I misused "atomist", I meant as in the verb "atomize". His attempt to record sensation and thought down to a base form, represented by text down to a base form, often 'short-circuited' past a point of conventional (or to some, legible) language to simulate the essentials of experience.
Gadzooks! Who sez Dylan deserved the Nobel? I think it was a conspiracy perpetrated by Them.
The committee is a giant Adenoid!
>A screaming comes across the sky... Pynchon in a cape wielding in his left hand a salami descends to Sweden and demands his rightful Nobel.
(((Thurn und Taxis)))