I feel like poetry is inherently childish. Not pretentious, childish.

Say that to these babies:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
(…)
MERCUTIO: O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!
(…)
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

>>8348293
dam. really made me think

in fact, wtf i hate poetry now

A childish poem would be about farts. An adult poem would be about work. What you should've been smart enough to realize is that some poetry is childish and some poetry isn't. Also I think it's fucking stupid you think being childish is something wrong. Children are fucking geniuses when it comes to figuring thing out, I wish I still figured stuff out that fast. I know about of useless shit and I can use my intelligence to make interesting connections, but if a kid new all this shit and still looked at it with a childlike wonder; he could say a lot of interesting stuff too.

You're too silly to take seriously. A child thinks of childish things.

>>8348464
Didn't review my post, I'm sorry.
>I know about of useless shit
>I know about a bunch of useless shit

>if a kid new
>if a kid knew

Man I need to look over what I write before I let other people see it. A lot to learn about myself from that.

>>8348293
Ok, Ropespear, who told you your poems suck?

You are comparing songs to symphonies.

>making quick, shallow strokes on the water

What do you base this statement on? Please don't be so retarded that the reason for saying this is that poems are short

>>8348293
You don't know poetry, you don't know anything. Shut the fuck up and try to learn something before you open your mouth.

>>8348293
A great poem has such an absurdly multifaceted depth that it makes almost any prose ever written look simple and narrow-minded, if not awkward. It's like comparing a symphony to a string quartet piece. Yes, you might prefer the smaller sound and arrangements, but the quartet is unarguably limited in its resources compared to a full orchestra using all the poetic devices and resources that don't work for prose, and molding repeating motifs and style to give meaning to the content. What do you think poems are? Dante's Comedy is a poem., Virgil's Aeneid is a poem. Browning's The Ring and the Book is a poem, but they are epics, in no way inferior to a long novel. A fine poem is a iceberg, betraying only flashes of its full weight and meaning until you dive into it properly. I've been reading Eliot's Four Quartets regularly for 15 years now, and it still reveals new references and concepts every time. I can give you individual lines by Eliot that you have to read an entire book to appreciate, but they fit into the greater theme like jewels in pocket-watch gears.

>>8349006
>its really deep
>I won't explain how though, you dummies won't get it :3

>>8349033
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

>>8349033
Bud he did explain how???

>>8349033
I thought I did a reasonable job of gesturing at the topic. It's not possible to fully outline the nature of poetry in a few sentences, you know. Let me put it this way: you know Yeats' poem "The Two Trees"?
http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/the_two_trees.html
A nice love poem, right? When people analyze this, they jump into all kinds of associations, and interpretations--some reasonable, some unlikely, some absurd--but the poem can bear it. Its ambiguity isn't a weakness, it's an advantage, like Keats' negative capability. When I took the Golden Dawn's version of the kabbalistic Sephiroth and Qlippoth (the "qlipothic tree" consists of 10 spheres in opposition to the sephirot on the Tree of Life), knowing that Yeats had been studying one of the order's "flying rolls" on the subject around the time of composition (1890-93), I noted that the poem had two stanzas of 20 lines each, forming twenty interlocked couplets, and there were enough clues to match them to each sephira. For instance, the qliphah Harab Serapel [Ravens of the Burning of God] matches up to the lines "There, through the broken branches, go/ The ravens of unresting thought."
Much of the symbolism of the ceremonies of the elemental Grades of the Golden Dawn centres on the Fall from the Garden of Eden, and how the centres of human consciousness were dragged down from the upper part of the Tree of Life to the lower part, and invaded by the forces of evil and disorder. One of the underlying goals of the system, within the Inner Order, was to raise the centre of consciousness from the lower Sephiroth to the upper again. And that's just one aspect of the poem's dense and complex symbolism.
My point is, that's a 40-line poem that's been appreciated and studied in various ways for well over a century now, and it has endless value and secrets. The idea that good poetry is in any sense "quick" or "shallow" compared to prose is just backwards. Poetry is the distilled and most difficult use of language--if anything is childish and simple, it's generally prose, not poetry. I'm not being paid to teach you to appreciate Yeats or poetry (and it's probably a hopeless task, given your attitude), but calling poetry "inherently childish" is just silly. Don't do it around educated people in real life, for your own sake. Just say you don't like it, and leave it at that.

>tfw OP is a literal philistine