JESUS GUYS I'M SORRY I REALLY can't read poetry. It's

pls halp

>>8851933
Bumping to help this poor lad

Because you are an idiot who says books when he means novels.

Also, start with something "easier", like Poe or Whitman, or even the Poetry bools of the Bible so you get a feeling of how to read poetry, especially Paradise Lost.

File: IMG_0135.jpg (185KB, 567x799px) Image search: [Google]

185KB, 567x799px

My advice OP, is to find a prose version of an epic poem in another language. Try Gilgamesh, Homer, or Dante and then read the same passage in a verse translation. You'll notice how the poetry captures what the prose can't and you'll end up understanding how to read epics. It's the method that I did, and it worked for me. Good luck, OP!

>>8851933
What?

Do you mean Paradife Loft?

smoke heroin

>>8851933

Paradise Lost is pretty difficult. How about shorter lyrics? How do you feel about this poem:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

>Try to read poetry.
>Can't stop reading it in the tune of a children's poem with a standard beat/rhyming pattern.
>Unable to understand what i'm reading.

>>8851933
I enjoy poems that require deciphering. If a poem requires that you grasp its structure in order to understand it, then it is right up my alley.

I guess, for me it's about how creative an artist can get with their use of structure and symbols. If a poem is about feelings rather than idea - get it out of my face. I'm not into that. If, however, you have interesting ideas layered in symbols and hidden in the structure - I love it. Give me more!

I used to read tons of fiction novels as a boy, but as I got older I slowly replaced them all with poetry, philosophy, and mathematics.

>>8851933
Shit, is it that bad? I'm taking a class on it next semester

>>8852150
What is the meaning behind this poem?

>>8852650
Not the anon who posted it, but keep in mind that the whole point of poetry is to go places that the intellect can't fully understand.

Yes, there are obviously real meanings in poems, but to take an intellectual understanding of poetry as "the goal" is to miss out on a lot of the experience.

What did the experience of reading this bring up for you?

>>8852650
The meaning is not behind the poem, it's within in. It's not platonic. A poem does not reach for an idea that's outside of it. If it would be so, then you'd be able to reduce to poem to that idea, which is not possible. If you want to talk about poems and meanings, then don't perceive the latter as something external to the piece.

English is the worst language for poetry
Tbh to me poetry in English is still prose

>>8852850

Have you read Gerard Manly Hopkins? It may change your mind

>>8851933

Try reading it out loud, or at least subvocalizing. The rhythm and meter are there to help you

>>8851933
Some poetry is all about structure, some all about the sounds, some about painting an exact image, some about purely abstract concepts. You just have to find what you like and the best way to do that is just read more, eventually you'll read something that will hit you in the jimmies and then you'll know. I recommend flipping through anthologies and collections with many different authors from many different styles and points in time.

The problem I have with reading poetry like Paradise Loft is that my brain is so preoccupied with trying to understand the surface stuff (e.g. what's happening? who's talking? where is the scene located?) that I struggle to engage with the deeper content, like themes or subtext.

>>8853664

That's where I'm at.

When I read, very rarely do I stumble down a page and realize I didn't retain anything. With poetry, that's almost every line for me, except Faust, because it was more engaging and classy. This is ancient.


>>8852076
No I said books and I mean books. I read more history/biographies than novels.