TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

nah i cut all the pass-agg out of my diet tbph, but this is the shakespeare/yeats poll and frost will have his due consideration soon, i look fwd to more exposure.

that frost stuff is nice, did he continue writing after adolescence?

srsly u yanks are cute.

― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:51 (8 hours ago) Bookmark

haha

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i'm literally perning in a gyre with excitement

Mid-late-20th-Century:

Sceptr'd Isle

MacNeice
Larkin
Hill

God's Country

Stevens
Merrill
Berryman
Ammons

My favorite Merrill poem. The last stanza kills me.

I mean

you know

For Lear WS needed almost superhuman self-control. For all his gyres I don't think Yeats could go there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

this is no country... for yeats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

^^^^ mods, plz change thread title

nu-Shakespeare could be posting to Tumblr rite now -- would we know it? O_O

They knew it then, we'd know it now.

Didn't vote but I followed the arguments and while I sensed a lot more affection for Yeats I knew (and so did everybody) that it wasn't going to be enough.

thread took moral high ground of recognising greatness of both rather than turning it into a flamewar contest.

that was aerosmith's intention though

Nah -- we used it as an excuse to post great poems.

well it transpired as Robert Frost Is Awesome but yeah, great thread

I spent a fair amount of drive time today thinking about what to make heavy hitters poll #2 - what's anybody wanna do?

dare we approach Virgil's rostrum

*I* would be down for something involving GMH but I'm aware I'm pretty much alone on that. Go with your gut, dude

Thomas Hardy vs D.H. Lawrence

virgil vs dante

or homer vs milton

Flaubert vs Nabokov

Albarn vs Gillespie

oh wait I got it now

dickinson vs whitman

oh you already started it

lets get some women up in these polls tho, and by women, i mean, emily dickinson

max OTM iirc

(that poll's impossible to answer, tho)

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning, but yeah dickinson is the business

was lucky to have had a prof who was a Dickinson scholar tbh

or, if he didn't publish on Dickinson -- i don't know -- she was definitely one of his favorite poets, if not his favorite, and we did a lot of work on her stuff

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning

there's painful choosing. ow.

*I* would be down for something involving GMH

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

I would guess that Dickinson would be hard to beat by almost anyone - actually Dickinson vs. Donne might be a fair fight

or Dickinson vs Herbert

dickinson vs..... herself

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

this poll would be amazing and would probably lead to me reading some Dickinson, who like Frost is a massive black hole in British poetic education

god you guys are missing out

i dont know if youd like dickinson tho louis? dont you like big epic type bros? maybe whitman would be more your style?

Um...more or less my favourite poetry (that 1930's modernist biz) is decidedly UN-epic! Or at least, doesn't really go on for more than 20 pages at a pop, and usually keeps to one or two pages. The epic form is delightful when done well, however, so I'm open-minded about who I read.

great modern female poets: Susan Howe anyone? Elizabeth Bishop did that poem about a fish didn't she - the one that got polled up against some other poems - it's GREAT and I voted for it

*WHOM if we're being PERNICKETY

actually GMH is pretty much my favourite poetry fuck tha h8rs

I want to love Hopkins, but the rhymes and rhythms jangle in an awkward way. Behind the rhetorical legerdemain is content that Donne and Herbert have approached more...delicately, let's say.

maybe GMH is a unique synthesis of anguished melodrama and infernal systemic-scattergun complexity, two things which have always defined my youthful thoughts

or he's just got an ear for cadence that I haven't heard the like of, ever else

it only deepens my affection, that he makes up compound-adjectives and expressions like 'inscape' and 'instress' to suit his wild purposes - he seems genuinely to be inventing and discovering a new poetic, one that in this pure moment of creation only he can compose - and this new poetic enables him to look within mystical processes in a manner that reveals the very structure of his sensual imagination - his entire comprehension of life is splattered manically onto the page as if attempting to chronicle the totality of God - observe how elongated I have become in response - it is silly but no poet has evinced such throes - such exquisite tortures

'rollrock highroad roaring down' are seven of my favorite syllables of all time. the rest is hit or miss.

LJ OTM imo -- good post

'Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves' is the most perfect document of English language, IMO, but enough of this - I need sleep

xpost

although, tbh, the only GMH i've encountered was a little bit here and there in college -- all scattershot

go on then, I've posted this to ILX like 3 times before but why not again

accents are for stress

Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves

EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steedèd and páshed — qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds — black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.